{"id":85525,"date":"2018-12-06T06:24:18","date_gmt":"2018-12-06T14:24:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/12\/astronomers-think-theyve-figured-out-the-raging-swirls-of-gas-around-supermassive-black-holes"},"modified":"2018-12-06T06:24:18","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T14:24:18","slug":"astronomers-think-theyve-figured-out-the-raging-swirls-of-gas-around-supermassive-black-holes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/12\/astronomers-think-theyve-figured-out-the-raging-swirls-of-gas-around-supermassive-black-holes","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers Think They\u2019ve Figured Out the Raging Swirls of Gas Around Supermassive Black Holes"},"content":{"rendered":"

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There are churning, hellish, hot-and-cold gas storms swirling around our universe\u2019s supermassive black holes<\/a>. But the scientists who discovered them would prefer you call them \u201cfountains.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a change from \u201cdonuts,\u201d the term researchers previously used to describe the roiling masses. But a paper published Oct. 30 in The Astrophysical Journal<\/a> reveals that the donut model of the mass around black holes may have been too simplistic.<\/p>\n

About two decades ago, researchers noticed that the monster black holes at the centers of galaxies tended to be obscured by clouds of matter \u2014 matter that wasn\u2019t falling into the black holes but rather circulating nearby. But astronomers couldn\u2019t get a clear look at those clouds. They were able to simulate the currents around black holes, though, as in this example published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters in 2002<\/a>, and they concluded that those clouds were donut-shaped \u2014 gas falling toward the black hole<\/a>, getting heated up by proximity and bouncing away, only to fall back toward it again.[What\u2019s That? Your Physics Questions Answered<\/a>].<\/p>\n

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There are churning, hellish, hot-and-cold gas storms swirling around our universe\u2019s supermassive black holes. But the scientists who discovered them would prefer you call them \u201cfountains.\u201d That\u2019s a change from \u201cdonuts,\u201d the term researchers previously used to describe the roiling masses. But a paper published Oct. 30 in The Astrophysical Journal reveals that the donut [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85525\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}