The NASA-funded study has used computer simulations to show that deep in space, tsunami-like structures may form on much bigger scales, due to gas escaping the gravitational pull of a supermassive black Hole. The study is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Black holes are not properly understood by our scientists due to limited knowledge on how space and time exist and how the blankness of space is formed. Most scientists are clueless about how time moves and how gravity is created. Without this basic knowledge of our universe, we are but a scared race that tries to make sense of creation through culture and religion.

Black holes are theorized by various scientists as fissures in space or extremely densely packed matter. Some think they are wormholes leading to another place in the universe. Blackholes have gravity so strong that they do not let even photos or light pass near them, even far off light is bent and it creates what is called a “lensing effect”. So a black hole can be seen when it passes in front of existing light from the background or a celestial body. It appears like a lens, distorting what’s behind and its center appearing completely black, hence the name.

As per NASA’s piece written by Elizabeth Landau  “What governs phenomena here on Earth are the laws of physics that can explain things in outer space and even very far outside the black hole,” said Daniel Proga, an astrophysicist at the University of Las Vegas, Nevada.

“These clouds are Ten Times Hotter than the surface of the Sun and moving at the speed of the solar wind, so they are rather exotic objects that you would not want an airplane to fly through,” said lead author Tim Waters, a postdoctoral researcher at UNLV who is also a guest scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

When a black hole with a mass larger than a million Suns feeds off material from a surrounding disk at the center of a galaxy, the system is called an “active galactic nucleus.” Active galactic nuclei may additionally have relativistic jets at their poles and a thick shroud of material blocking our view of the central activity. But circulating plasma above the disk, just far enough that it won’t fall into the black hole, shines incredibly bright in X-rays — so bright that astronomers have been able to catalog over a million of these objects.

According to NASA website:

{Strong winds, at least in part driven by this radiation, storm out of this central region in what’s called an “outflow.” Researchers want to understand the complicated interactions of gas with X-rays, and not just near the event horizon, where those X-rays are produced. The effects of these central X-rays can be important all the way out to tens of light-years from the black hole. In addition to launching outflows, X-ray irradiation may explain the presence of various populations of denser regions called clouds. Last year Proga and colleagues published simulations showing that more distant clouds can be produced within an outflow.

“These clouds are ten times hotter than the surface of the Sun and moving at the speed of the solar wind, so they are rather exotic objects that you would not want an airplane to fly through,” said lead author Tim Waters, a postdoctoral researcher at UNLV who is also a guest scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. 

Now, the group has demonstrated for the first time just how complicated the clouds within these outflows from the central black hole engine really are. Their simulations show that just within the distance where the supermassive black hole loses its grip on the surrounding matter, the relatively cool atmosphere of the spinning disk can form waves, similar to the surface of the ocean.  When interacting with hot winds, these waves can steepen into spiraling vortex structures that can reach a height of 10 light-years above the disk.  That’s more than twice the distance from the Sun to its closest star, which is a little over 4 light-years.  By the time tsunami-shaped clouds form, they are no longer influenced by the black hole’s gravity.

The simulations show how X-ray light coming from the plasma near the black hole first inflates pockets of heated gas within the atmosphere of the accretion disk beyond a certain distance from the active galactic nucleus. Heated plasma rises like a balloon, expanding into and disrupting the surrounding cooler gas.  It can be scorching — hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of degrees, no matter which unit of measurement one might use.  

Instead of a subsea volcanic eruption causing tsunamis, these hot pockets of gas in the outskirts of the accretion disk initiate the outward propagating disturbance. As the gas particles form a gigantic tsunami-like structure, it blocks the accretion disk wind, spawning a separate pattern of spiral structures known as a Kármán vortex street, with each vortex spanning a light-year in size. The phenomenon is named for physicist Theodore von Kármán, one of the founders of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

This all may sound exotic and far-flung, but Kármán vortex streets are common weather patterns on Earth that structural engineers must worry about, especially with regards to bridges.

The new results contradict a longstanding theory that the clouds in the vicinity of an active galactic nucleus form spontaneously out of hot gas through the action of a fluid instability. They also go against the idea that magnetic fields are needed to propel cooler gas from a disk into the wind.

“While it all makes sense in hindsight, it was initially quite confusing to observe that thermal instability cannot produce cold gas directly, yet it can take the place of magnetic fields by lifting cold gas into the wind,” said Waters.

Armed with these simulations, researchers hope to work with observational astronomers to use telescopes to look for signs of these dynamics.}

End of Nasa text.

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