I found this interesting as I am interested in black holes.

Scientists say they have captured a supermassive black hole just as it was belching out a jet of supercharged particles, offering a first look at how these cosmic jets form.

Supermassive black holes form the core of many galaxies and astronomers have long believed they are responsible for ejecting jets of particles at nearly the speed of light.

But just how they do it has remained a mystery.

An international team of researchers led by Professor Alan Marscher of Boston University just got its first peek, using powerful radio telescopes.

Marscher's team aimed the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very Long Baseline Array, a system of 10 radio telescopes, at the galaxy BL Lacertae.

A kind of supermassive black hole known as a blazar was suspected of spewing out a pair of forceful streams of plasma some 950 million light-years from earth.

What they saw was a close up of this charged material winding in corkscrew fashion out of the supermassive black hole, behaving just as astronomers have predicted.

"We have gotten the clearest look yet at the innermost portion of the jet, where the particles actually are accelerated," says Marscher, whose study appears today in the journal Nature.

"It helps us understand how these objects are able to accelerate particles up to the near velocity of light," says University of Michigan astronomy professor Hugh Aller, who worked on the project.

A black hole is a concentration of mass so dense that little can escape its gravitational pull. Aller says that as objects fall into the black hole, others get shot out at very high velocities.

But the trick is capturing enough data at the right time to study how this works.

"We never know when these objects will go off. It depends on when the object falls into it," Aller says.

He says the acceleration process is similar to the output of a jet engine.

"We think it is focused by a nozzle of sorts and it comes out at us," he says.

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It is suggesting Albert that the material is ejected in a "Cork Screw" effect. I picture that like water in your sink when you pull the plug. The water is being ejected down the drain but it must also be Cork Screwing as the water goes down the drain.

John.

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