April 14, 2009: In our violent, discordant, and effervescent
universe, reality always seems to be stranger than fiction. Case
in point: there is a galaxy 54 million light-years away that is
shooting out a 5,000-light-year-long, narrow beam of radiation
and plasma that is as opulent as a Star Wars light saber and as
destructive as the film's Death Star. This extragalactic jet is
being fueled and ejected from the vicinity of a monster black
hole that is 3 billion times the mass of our Sun. The disk
around a rapidly spinning black hole has magnetic field lines
that entrap ionized gas falling toward the black hole. These
particles, along with radiation, flow rapidly away from the
black hole along the magnetic field lines. The rotational energy
of the spinning accretion disk adds momentum to the outflowing
jet. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has been used to keep an eye
on these million-degree fireworks for more than a decade. Hubble
has caught the jet flickering. In particular, a glowing knot in
the outflowing str