I was under the impression nothing could escape a black hole's pull. Is this due to the compression of things in the outside the event horizon?
Edit: Fixed link. On mobile, sorry for formatting
by Dr-Quinn33
I was under the impression nothing could escape a black hole's pull. Is this due to the compression of things in the outside the event horizon?
Edit: Fixed link. On mobile, sorry for formatting
by Dr-Quinn33
7 Comments
They don’t.
You’re either misreading the article, or it’s absolutely horribly written. Hard to tell.
Nothing can escape a black hole *once it falls past the event horizon*.
Stable orbits can and do exist around black holes. Black holes can swallow stuff that falls inward instead of being in a stable orbit. They can also fling things around that aren’t in a stable orbit, like that matter in those plasma jets. The incredibly strong gravity well and magnetic field around a black hole can act as a slingshot rather than a vacuum cleaner in the right circumstances.
Specifically, nothing can escape from beyond the event horizon. As long as it’s not beyond that, stuff can escape, and it does all the time. When black hole is consuming matter, it consumes matter the fastest in the equator, and because of the super strong pull power, a lot of matter gets pressed toward the poles, where it gets massively compressed and heated up, and the pressure shoots out extremely high energy particles and matter on both poles, creating those jets. So those jets, and the glow of the black hole is happening around the event horizon, nothing actually shoots up from the black hole itself.
>Answer: The matter that we observe as jets emanating from a black hole are not actually coming from the black hole itself. The jets are composed of matter which is escaping from the accretion disk which surrounds the black hole. Although the mechanism by which the jets are produced is not completely understood, the process likely involves the acceleration of matter near the poles of the black hole and an interaction with the tangled magnetic field in the region near the poles of the accretion disk. The material in the jets is measured to be travelling at less than the speed of light.
When the article says that the jets are coming out of a black hole, that’s been simplified into colloquial terms. Probably oversimplifed. The jets aren’t coming out from inside the event horizon, but from matter near the event horizon. “Near” is relative because the innermost stable circular orbit for a black hole is three times the radius of the event horizon.
It’s mostly because there is no possible direction that will lead out of the black hole. All possible paths lead towards the singularity, which is an inevitable future point in time.
These jets don’t escape the black hole. The black hole spits them out, lol.
Basically, as the gas spins around it gets faster and faster until its pressure builds so high that it explodes outwards.