The Chandra X-Ray Observatory has spotted a distant black hole shooting out jets of material, at close to the speed of light.

It's coming from the material circling around the black hole and being heated by that motion.

Material in the disk can rotate around the black hole for a long time.

Some of the material in the disk leaves via the jets, and the jets are compelled to follow magnetic field lines local to the black hole.

The results of these observations are presented in a paper titled "Relativistic X-ray jets from the black hole X-ray binary MAXI J1820+070." The lead author is Mathilde Espinasse of the Université de Paris.

In superluminal motion, the jet of material travelling towards the observer appears to be transgressing the speed of light limit.

What's happening is that the jet of material itself is travelling at near light speed.

And the light coming from the material is travelling at, well, light speed.

In actual fact, the jets of material are both travelling at the same speed: just over 80 percent the speed of light.

And the light from both jets is travelling at light speed.

That amount is roughly similar to how much material the black hole could collect on its accretion disk in only a few hours.

Most of the energy in the jets is released when the particles interact with other material around the black hole.