A NASA telescope reveals a giant black hole jet like never before

Particles blasting from a supermassive black hole jet appear to be traveling at nearly the speed of light — much faster than scientists had previously clocked them, according to new research. While most observations of black holes in space are with radio telescopes, a research team used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to study their jets in a new light — literally. What they found with the X-ray telescope was surprising. "We've shown a new approach to studying jets, and I think there's a lot of interesting work to be done," said David Bogensberger, lead author of the study, in a statement. SEE ALSO: Scientists found a colossal black hole near the dawn of time In a composite image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Centaurus A galaxy, jets are seen blasting from the accretion disk in opposite directions. Credit: ESO / WFI / MPIfR / ESO / APEX / A.Weiss et al. / NASA / CXC / CfA /R.Kraft et al. Black holes were little more than a theory 50 years ago — a kooky mathematical solution to a physics problem — and even astronomers at the top of their field weren't entirely convinced they existed. Today, not only are supermassive black holes accepted science, they're getting their pictures taken by a collection of enormous, synced-up radio dishes on Earth. Supermassive black holes, millions to billions of times more massive than the sun, are thought to lurk at the center of virtually all large galaxies. What we know is this: Falling into a black hole is an automatic death sentence. Any cosmic stuff that wanders too close reaches a point of no return. But scientists have observed something weird at the edge of black holes' accretion disks, the ring of rapidly spinning material around the hole, like the swirl of water around a bathtub drain: A tiny amount of that stuff can suddenly get rerouted. When that happens, high-energy particles can get flung outward as a pair of jets, blasting in opposite directions, though astronomers haven't figured out exactly how t