Cosmic rays are energetic particles moving at high speeds. Because it takes significant energy to create them, they often serve as cosmic messengers, revealing clues about the extreme environments that produce them — such as supermassive black holes. On Earth, scientists use accelerators to generate and study particles moving at high speeds, but nature needs no such apparatus. Now, researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have found a possible mechanism behind nature’s own particle accelerators: When the magnetic fields in the material around a supermassive black hole get tangled, they can generate conditions that send cosmic rays skipping off through the universe.
Supermassive black holes often spew jets of hot plasma from just outside their event horizon. (Plasma is a state of matter in which both ionized atoms that have lost their electrons and those lost electrons coexist.) In their work, published December 14 in Physical ...
