27.2 Supermassive black holes: what quasars really are  (Page 4/6)

Energy production around a black hole

By now, you may be willing to entertain the idea that huge black holes lurk at the centers of active galaxies. But we still need to answer the question of how such a black hole can account for one of the most powerful sources of energy in the universe. As we saw in Black Holes and Curved Spacetime , a black hole itself can radiate no energy. Any energy we detect from it must come from material very close to the black hole, but not inside its event horizon    .

In a galaxy, a central black hole    (with its strong gravity) attracts matter—stars, dust, and gas—orbiting in the dense nuclear regions. This matter spirals in toward the spinning black hole and forms an accretion disk of material around it. As the material spirals ever closer to the black hole, it accelerates and becomes compressed, heating up to temperatures of millions of degrees. Such hot matter can radiate prodigious amounts of energy as it falls in toward the black hole.

To convince yourself that falling into a region with strong gravity can release a great deal of energy, imagine dropping a printed version of your astronomy textbook out the window of the ground floor of the library. It will land with a thud, and maybe give a surprised pigeon a nasty bump, but the energy released by its fall will not be very great. Now take the same book up to the fifteenth floor of a tall building and drop it from there. For anyone below, astronomy could suddenly become a deadly subject; when the book hits, it does so with a great deal of energy.

Dropping things from far away into the much stronger gravity of a black hole is much more effective in turning the energy released by infall into other forms of energy. Just as the falling book can heat up the air, shake the ground, or produce sound energy that can be heard some distance away, so the energy of material falling toward a black hole can be converted to significant amounts of electromagnetic radiation.

What a black hole has to work with is not textbooks but streams of infalling gas. If a dense blob of gas moves through a thin gas at high speed, it heats up as it slows by friction. As it slows down, kinetic (motion) energy is turned into heat energy. Just like a spaceship reentering the atmosphere ( [link] ), gas approaching a black hole heats up and glows where it meets other gas. But this gas, as it approaches the event horizon, reaches speeds of 10% the speed of light and more. It therefore gets far, far hotter than a spaceship, which reaches no more than about 1500 K. Indeed, gas near a supermassive black hole reaches a temperature of about 150,000 K, about 100 times hotter than a spaceship returning to Earth. It can even get so hot—millions of degrees—that it radiates X-rays.

Friction in earth’s atmosphere.