Out in the depths of space, a bubble of hot gas has been discovered which measures more than 1,000 light years across and has been growing for 200,000 years. And-oh-by-the-way… it’s coming from a black hole.

Pretty cool, eh?

The black hole in question is a microquasar, which means that it emits jets of high-speed particles. Microquasars have been known to produce gas bubbles before, but never anything as big as this one, which is twice as big and ten times as powerful as any other known example.

All of this is taking place about 12 million light years away from us, in a galaxy called NGC 7793. (It’s a hip neighborhood.) Scientists aren’t sure yet about the size of the black hole itself, but their discovery is shedding some new light on how black holes emit energy. It has long been thought that the primary source of energy release was through x-rays. This finding, however, seems to indicate that jets of high-speed particles serve the same purpose, but with the added benefit of a giant bubble of hot gas.

Science is cool.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 8th, 2010 at 10:56 am and is filed under Notes from Dom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.