- Scientists have obtained the first-ever evidence that black holes can lose energy.
- They have long believed that magnetic fields can suck energy from black holes, but they had no evidence to prove it – until now.
- Supermassive black hole M87 emits energy like “Jedi lightsabers millions of light-years long,” said a co-author of a new study.
Scientists have long believed that black holes, which typically consume everything around them, can also lose energy.
But they had no proof – until now.
AND new study published this month showed that the supermassive black hole M87 emits enormous amounts of energy due to its magnetic field.
Alexandru Lupsasca, co-author of the study, he said the outflow jets “are essentially similar to Jedi lightsabers one million light years long” and may be 10 times longer than the Milky Way galaxy.
George Wong, the other co-author, said: “If you took the Earth, turned it into TNT and blew it up 1,000 times a second for millions of years, that’s the amount of energy you get with M87.”
Space.com recorded that Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity predicted that black holes could lose energy, and that scientists since the 1970s have believed that magnetic fields can extract energy from black holes.
But until now they didn’t know how.
M87 was famous in the scientific community before; it was the first black hole ever photographed, and a team of scientists from 20 countries worked for over a decade to capture the image.
