In my post regarding the M 87 black hole, I stated that you do not necessarily know what the black hole and its environs look like from that image. The popular image that seems to have taken over the web is just plain misleading because it focuses on radio waves very close to the event horizon. Katherine Bouma, who developed the algorithm that made the picture possible, explained that there were “an infinite number of possible images” that could explain the data, in part due to atmospheric disturbances of different kinds at widely dispersed sites, while the difficulty in getting good data intensity meant that there was an inherent uncertainty. On the other hand, the hole and the ring were valid. However, there is more that the black hole effects.
There is another image obtained from the Chandra X-ray telescope of the environs of the M 87 black hole You will see somewhere near the middle a small black dot that on closer investigation appears to be shaped like a cross. X marks the spot! This is exactly the case. The black hole, the radius of which is almost five times the distance from the sun to Pluto, is too small to register on this image. And whereas the first image was based on radio waves, this is recording x-rays.
As you can see, the effect covers a monstrous volume.
Why Xrays? This is because of the huge amount of energy being lost during a radiation event. To illustrate, a red dwarf star largely emits infrared radiation, and only a relatively low fraction is in the visible wavelength electromagnetic spectrum. Thus Proxima Centauri, which has a surface temperature of about 3,000 degrees K, puts out 85% of its emissions in the infrared spectrum (although flares do contribute some xrays) and its visible emissions are only 0.0056% as luminous as the sun (which has a surface temperature of about 5772 degrees K. Now, consider that five times the distance from the sun to Pluto does not really register on that image, this will give some indication of the power of the black hole. Those xrays are generated from the energy given off by dust heating as they fall into the regions of the black hole and give off the extraordinary energy of an xray in the spectrum.
The dust accelerates, gets hotter than the surface of most stars as a consequance of collisions, and eventually becomes a plasma that is orbiting the black hole at relativistic speeds. As an aside, this shows that the science fiction plots of a space ship suddenly coming across a lurking black hole is somewhat improbable. Observation should give good clues well in advance as the size of the Xray emissions around this one is comparable to the distance of most of the farthest stars we can see with the naked eye.
One of the most bizarre things about black holes is that sometimes you can see a jet of material travelling at relativistic speeds away from the polar regions of the black hole. The jets show only a few degrees of dispersion and these can travel up to millions of parsecs. One parsec is about 3.26 light years, so the nearest star to us, Proxima Centauri, is about 1.3 parsecs (4.2 light years) from the sun. The jets can leave a galaxy, and there are images from Hubble where the length of the jet dwarfs the galaxy from which it came. On the other hand, the black hole at the centre of our galaxy does not currently generate such a jet. In the Chandra X-ray image you can see the jet coming out of the M 87 system. (There will be another on exactly the other side of the system.)
This is one of the most powerful events that occur in the Universe, and while we have a qualitative idea of some of what might be powering it, the details are still to be worked out. One theory is that as the plasma spirals into the black hole, the magnetic field gets compressed and rotates, and this magnetic field then exerts a force on the plasma, with the net result that matter is ejected in a jet from the inner regions around the black hole. There is at least one alternative theory. Roger Penrose has proposed that the rotating black hole causes “frame dragging”, which can extract relativistic energies and momentum, essentially from the spin of the black hole. Of course the material being ejected did not come from the black hole, but rather some of the material falling into the black hole is caught before it reaches it and from whatever the cause is ejected at these fantastic energies. The net result is that energy and angular momentum are removed, which also aids the black hole to accrete more mass.
Which raises the question, why does the black hole at the centre of our galaxy not do this? The simple answer may well be that there is no matter close enough to fall in, and what is nearby is in stars that are stable and in a stable orbit. There is a lot we do not know about black holes, and we are unlikely to in the near future.
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