A Strange Black Hole is Shooting Out Wobbly Jets Because It's Dragging Spacetime

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A Strange Black Hole Is Shooting Out Wobbly Jets Because It's Dragging Spacetime:

Some 7,800 light-years away, in the constellation of Cygnus, lies a most peculiar black hole. It's called V404 Cygni, and in 2015, telescopes around the world stared in wonder as it woke from dormancy to devour material from a star over the course of a week.

That one event provided such a wealth of information that astronomers are still analysing it. And they have just discovered an amazing occurrence: relativistic jets wobbling so fast their change in direction can be seen in mere minutes.

[...] V404 Cygni is a binary microquasar system consisting of a black hole about nine times the mass of the Sun and a companion star, an early red giant slightly smaller than the Sun.

The black hole is slowly devouring the red giant; the material siphoned away from the star is orbiting the black hole in the form of an accretion disc, a bit like water circling a drain. The closest regions of the disc are incredibly dense and hot, and extremely radiant; and, as the black hole feeds, it shoots out powerful jets of plasma, presumably from its poles.

[...] "We think the disc of material and the black hole are misaligned," [astrophysicist James] Miller-Jones said. "This appears to be causing the inner part of the disc to wobble like a spinning top and fire jets out in different directions as it changes orientation."

[...] It's a bit like a spinning top that starts to wobble as it's slowing down, the researchers said. This change in the rotational axis of a spinning body is called precession. In this particular instance, we have a handy explanation for it courtesy of Albert Einstein.

In his theory of general relativity, Einstein predicted an effect called frame-dragging. As it spins, a rotating black hole's gravitational field is so intense that it essentially drags spacetime with it. (This is one of the effects scientists hoped to observe when they took a picture of PAwehi.)

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