Radio telescope reveals secrets of massive black hole

[Paxo]

'At the cores of many galaxies, supermassive black holes expel powerful jets of particles at nearly the speed of light. Just how they perform this feat has long been one of the mysteries of astrophysics.'

For the full story go to:

http://www.physorg.com/news128174330.html

Steve..

[supernova]

Very intresting but I thought nuffin could escape a black hole?

I am confrused.

[Paxo]

Bernie,

The simple answer is Hawking Radiation. In 1975 Stephen Hawking described how random particles can escape a black hole, these high energy particles have subsequently become known as Hawking Radiation. Here is the abstract:

Abstract 'In the classical theory black holes can only absorb and not emit particles. However it is shown that quantum mechanical effects cause black holes to create and emit particles as if they were hot bodies with temperature where ? is the surface gravity of the black hole. This thermal emission leads to a slow decrease in the mass of the black hole and to its eventual disappearance: any primordial black hole of mass less than about 10¹⁵ g would have evaporated by now. Although these quantum effects violate the classical law that the area of the event horizon of a black hole cannot decrease, there remains a Generalized Second Law:S+1/4A never decreases whereS is the entropy of matter outside black holes and A is the sum of the surface areas of the event horizons. This shows that gravitational collapse converts the baryons and leptons in the collapsing body into entropy. It is tempting to speculate that this might be the reason why the Universe contains so much entropy per baryon.

I hope that makes sense now, I have the full article if you need it :lol:

Steve..