We Finally Know How Black Holes Produce The Most Brilliant Light in The Universe - ScienceAlert

Some of the brightest light in the Universe comes from supermassive black holes, in fact.

Scientists have finally figured out the mechanism producing the incredible high-energy light that reaches us from billions of years ago: Shocks in the black hole's jets that boost the speed of particles to mind-blowing velocities.

Most of the galaxies in the Universe are built around a supermassive black hole.

The frictional and gravitational interactions at play in the extreme space surrounding a black hole cause this material to heat up and shine brightly across a range of wavelengths.

The other – the one at play in blazars – are twin jets of material launched from the polar regions outside the black hole, perpendicular to the disk.

These jets are thought to be material from the inner rim of the disk that, rather than falling toward the black hole, gets accelerated along external magnetic field lines to the poles, where it is launched at very high speeds, close to the speed of light.

"The first X-ray polarization measurements of this class of sources allowed, for the first time, a direct comparison with the models developed from observing other frequencies of light, from radio to very high-energy gamma rays," says astronomer Immacolata Donnarumma of the Italian Space Agency.

At the same time, other observatories were measuring the light from other wavelength ranges, from radio to optical, which previously were the only data available for Markarian 501.