We now know why black hole jets make high-energy radiation - Ars Technica

The light originates from jets of material hurled out at nearly the speed of light by the environment around the black hole.

The data from it and other observations combined indicate that light is produced when the black hole jets slam into slower-moving materials.

For example, photons that originate in a turbulent environment will have an essentially random polarization, while a more structured environment will tend to produce photons with a limited range of polarizations.

Light that passes through material or magnetic fields can also have its polarization altered.

One of those is that the environment in the jets is turbulent, with chaotic pile-ups of materials and magnetic fields.

The new set of observations is a coordinated campaign to record the blazar Markarian 501 using a variety of telescopes capturing polarization at longer wavelengths, with IXPE handling the highest energy photons.

But it's far less disordered than you'd expect from a turbulent material with complicated magnetic fields.

While these results provide a better understanding of how black holes produce light, that process ultimately relies on the production of jets, which takes place much closer to the black hole.

How these jets form is still not really understood, so people studying black hole astrophysics still have a reason to go back to work after the holiday weekend.