Mysterious mechanisms at play at the edge of the event horizon | Hacker News Reader

Mysterious mechanisms at play at the edge of the event horizon

eso.org

48 pointsdnetesn8 comments

"While most of this matter is fed into the black hole, some can escape moments before capture and be flung out into space at close to the speed of light as part of a jet of plasma. How this happens is not well understood..."

Sounds like a run-of-the-mill game physics glitch.

Eagerly awaiting the day that we use this to speedrun the universe.

Definitely, the programmers need to stay away from integration methods that introduce energy. Jeez, I thought everybody figured this out by now.

I hear it goes away if you take the accretion disc out of the gravity well and blow on it.

Interesting that "only a few light-days" is considered "very close" for this application. For reference, even a single light-day is 6x greater than the orbit of Pluto.

Could this observation be related at all to the AMPS firewall theory? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_(physics) - either a confirmation of it, or evidence that something else is going on? The theory seems to suggest that the firewall itself would not be visible outside the event horizon, however.

Recent pop sci article by Joseph Polchinski about the theory in April's Scientific American: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/black-hole-firewal... (paywall)

At this time, the title of the article is actually "ALMA Reveals Intense Magnetic Field Close to Supermassive Black Hole", and I believe it's a substantially better one.

The rules about titles on Hacker News are both stupidly strict and then erratically enforced: a bad combination. dang said he would bring more transparency to this, and he has done so where he comments, but I assume, his time being finite, he often has to focus on other things, which leads to the erratic nature of the enforcement. I do wish they would allow more freedom about titles and also about article submissions. I'd also love to see more transparency about why certain articles are forbidden, such as this one: http://gawker.com/why-weve-decided-to-organize-1698246231

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