Supercomputer provides black hole breakthrough

supercomputer simulations, astronomers have discovered more about how black holes interact with space-time.
Black holes are regions of space-time whose gravitational effects are so strong that even electromagnetic radiation such as light can not escape from inside

As such they are incredibly difficult to study, although a collaboration between researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands have managed just that.

- NASA (@NASA) December 2, 2017
They were examining the "relativistic jets" from black holes, the material that actually does manage to escape from them - one of the most mysterious phenomena in modern astronomy.
As explained by Northwestern University: "Similar to how water in a bathtub forms a whirlpool as it goes down a drain, the gas and magnetic fields that feed a supermassive black hole swirl to form a rotating disk - a tangled spaghetti of magnetic field lines mixed in a broth of hot gas

- NASA (@NASA) November 24, 2017
"As the black hole consumes this astrophysical soup, it gobbles up the broth but leaves the magnetic spaghetti dangling out of its mouth. This makes the black hole in a kind of launching pad, from which relativistic jets of form, from the shoots the web of twisted magnetic spaghetti. "
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The scientists ran complex simulations on one of the world's most powerful supercomputers and discovered that these relativistic jets were actually replaced with the result of space-time itself being dragged into the rotation of the black hole.

- XPRIZE (@xprize) November 6, 2015
"Understanding how rotating black holes drag the space-time around them and how this process affects what we see through the telescopes remains a crucial, difficult-to-crack puzzle," according to one of the researchers.
Alexander Tchekhovskoy, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, said: "Fortunately, the breakthroughs in code development and leaps in supercomputer architecture is the answers to finding us closer to ever being."