Black holes are notorious for gobbling up, well, everything.
"They are often seen as sort of cosmic vacuum cleaners, just sucking in all the material gas and stars that stray close," says Priyamvada Natarajan, an astrophysicist at Yale University.
They're icons of destruction, ruthless voids, ambivalent abysses from which nothing can return.
At least, according to pop culture. According to science, there's a whole world of nuance.
"What is counterintuitive is that we do see very powerful jets of material that are actually expelled from them as well," Natarajan says.
These jets that shoot out from supermassive black holes, like the one at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, are sometimes millions of light years long. They carry huge amounts of energy and radiation.
"One should think of them perhaps in the same way as one thinks about nuclear power," says Roger Blandford, an astrophysicist and professor at Stanford University. "Of course, they can be famously destructive, but also it can be a source of power in a nuclear reactor."
Blandford and his colleague Roman Znajek are known for coming up with an explanation for how these jets get their energy, known as the Blandford-Znajek process. Telescope images from the last few years have supported their hypothesis.
If you liked this episode you might want to hear more about supermassive black holes, what it might be like to fall into a black hole or lessons we can learn from black holes.
Got other cosmic curiosities? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.
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Today's episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer.
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