Blasts of radiation brighter than a trillion suns. Charged
particles with the energy of a well-thrown baseball. Jets of
magnetized plasma streaming across intergalactic space. What do
these have in common? Their energy is derived from black holes.
Today, at the 2009 Fermi Symposium in Washington, DC, Charles
Dermer, an astrophysicist in the Space Science Division of the
Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), and Govind Menon, a professor
of physics at Troy University, Troy, Alabama, are describing
black holes as the sources of the highest energy photon and
particle radiations. In particular, rapidly rotating black holes
could make the radio and gamma-ray luminous supermassive black-
hole blazars. Newly born black holes could accelerate the
highest energy cosmic rays and make the brief bright gamma-ray
emissions known as gamma-ray bursts. Black holes, so-named
because not even light can escape their inner regions, are
actually extraordinarily luminous, "and have little in common
with their proverbial counterpart," sa