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Black Hole

A black hole is an astronomical object whose gravity is so strong that nothing—even light—can escape from within its event horizon. It forms when a massive star’s core collapses or through other processes, and may have an accretion disk of infalling matter that emits radiation. Supermassive black holes at galaxy centers influence stellar orbits, and mergers produce gravitational waves.

Source: nasa.gov

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The X-Ray Jets of XTE J1550

08/10/2002

The X-Ray Jets of XTE J1550
Image Credit: NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

The motion of ultra-fast jets shooting out from a candidate black hole star system have now been documented by observations from the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory. In 1998, X-ray source XTE J1550-564 underwent a tremendous outburst. Jets of material sent streaming into space at near light-speed impacted existing gas heating it so much it glowed in X-ray light. The panels on the left of the above image show in X-rays that the hot spots have moved out by more than three light years in the time since the explosion, with the left jet recently fading below detectability. The drawing of the right depicts the binary star system that likely produced the X-ray jets, with a normal red star on the left dumping matter into an accretion disk around the black hole on the right. The jets are thought to be emitted along the spin axis of the black hole.