Quasar Jets: Space’s Death Ray

Quasar Jets: Space’s Death Ray

It is little secret that black holes are great at absorbing things, anything from a space rock to a star falling into these massive bodies, speeding up as they reach their destination, but what happens if they miss. The answer is a Quasar Jet. As the name implies, quasar jets can only be produced by a very specific kind of black hole, a quasar. A quasar is just another name for a supermassive black hole, the kind of black hole weighing over 100,000 suns and the only kind strong enough to produce jets, that is in the process of feasting. You can generally find one of these quasars by its accretion disk, a burning pulp of crushed stars and other such bodies orbiting the quasar in a massive luminous disk, and it is this disk that fuels the Quasar Jets. These disks are not drifting peacefully about the black hole, they are falling, spinning faster and faster as they get closer to their doom, reaching velocities near the speed of light. Because of this insane speed all the particles in the accretion disk smashing into each other like the particles in some massive collider, causing the disks to burn brighter than every other star in most you average galaxy combined.

Of course, most of these near light speed or relativistic particles end their journey in the quasar itself adding to its mass, but a very small amount of them are moving at just the right angle so that instead of falling into the black hole, they miss by a hair and go careening off into space. These particles have to be moving almost perfectly perpendicular to the disc otherwise they will be pulled back into the black hole, so they arrange themselves into two immense jets coming off either side of the quasar. These beams of relativistic particles are the Quasar Jets, extending several thousand light years in either direction and packing enough force not just disintegrate a star, but to permanently alter the shapes of galaxies, these I believe, are the top contender for the spot of space's number one death ray.

Astronomers observed the innermost structure of a quasar jet. ALMA. (n.d.). https://www.almaobservatory.org/en/press-releases/astronomers-observed-the-innermost-structure-of-a-quasar-jet/ 

Cnrs. (2020, June 17). Quasar jets are particle accelerators thousands of light-years long. Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2020-06-quasar-jets-particle-thousands-light-years.html#:~:text=13-,Quasar%20jets%20are%20particle%20accelerators%20thousands%20of%20light%2Dyears%20long,with%20the%20associated%20gamma%20radiation. 

NASA. (2020, October 14). The recipe for powerful Quasar Jets. NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/recipe-powerful-quasar-jets/ 

ESO/WFI (Optical); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al. (Submillimetre); NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. (X-ray) - http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso0903a/