Black hole outburst caught on video

Astronomers have caught a black hole hurling hot material into space at close to the speed of light. This flare-up was captured in a new movie from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The black hole and its companion star make up a system called MAXI J1820+070, located in our galaxy about 10,000 light years from Earth.

The black hole in MAXI J1820+070 has a mass about eight times that of the sun, identifying it as a so-called stellar-mass black hole, formed by the destruction of a massive star. (This is in contrast to supermassive black holes that contain millions or billions of times the sun's mass.)

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Credit: Chandra X-ray Center

X-ray/Optical & Infrared.

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Some of the hot gas in the disk will cross what is called the event horizon, or, the point of no return, and fall into the black hole. But some of it is also blasted away from the black hole in a pair of short beams of material, or jets.

These jets are pointed in opposite directions, launched from outside the event horizon along magnetic field lines.

Using four observations obtained by Chandra in 2018 and 2019, astronomers were able to capture footage of this black hole's behavior.