Black holes & spin offs @ The Royal Society

Went to this lecture:

Professor Katherine Blundell, University of Oxford

The popular notion of a black hole “sucking in everything” from its surroundings only happens very close to a black hole.  Far away, the pull of the black hole is identical to that of anything else of the same mass. However, black holes do give rise to many remarkable phenomena such as extragalactic quasars and, in our own Galaxy, microquasars. This is because gravity is not the only law of physics that must be obeyed. Matter can be spun off from near black holes in the form of winds and jets that spread through their surroundings and thus cause black holes to have tremendous cosmic influence many light years beyond their event horizons.

Notes: Surrounding the black hole is a perimeter called the Event Horizon, if an object travels inside this point, it cannot escape the pull of the black hole, as it would have to travel faster than the speed of light to do so, which is impossible.

At the centre of our galaxy, 4 million times larger than our sun is a black hole. Plumes of matter are ejected each side of some black holes, from the accretion disk, can be fed by a binary star. Can’t find the NASA video she used, which is annoying but the disk’s matter is fed from the star.

If we knew where we were going, it wouldn’t be research!