Gas magnet slows black hole meal

摘要

The supermassive black hole at our galaxy's centre enjoys a slow dinner, thanks to a giant magnet. The black hole, Sagittarius A*, is clearly sucking in hot gas because doing so makes it burp out radio waves. But jets of matter streaming outwards slow down its gas consumption. "The black hole is not feeding to its full potential," says Ralph Eatough at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany. To find out whether the jets could be the result of a magnetic field produced by charged ions swirling around in the gas, Eatough and colleagues looked at a nearby pulsar.