This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
If Stephen Hawking mated with Jim Croce, their love spawn would surely have gotten around to writing "Superluminal Lover," a charming little ditty about supermassive black holes and the relativistic plasma jets spouting from them. --- Attracted by your gravity, your body's so compact Pulling me inward, prepare for close contact No strength to resist, spinning out of control Falling toward the abyss, approaching the black hole Full of twisting magnetism, feeling hot inside Bursting forth with energy, ready for a high-speed ride Acceleration growing, focusing my beam The jet starts flowing, plasma shoots downstream --- Could Spinal Tap have said it any better? It goes on. And just so you don't drown in the quantum foam of in-jokes: "relativistic" means moving at near light-speed; and "superluminal" refers to an optical will-o-the-wisp in which relativistic jets pointing straight at us can appear to exceed the speed of light. If "Superluminal Lover" touched your "naked singularity," thank composer-performer-physicist Alan Marscher of Boston University, lead author of the research described in my story about Marscher et al.'s latest findings on relativistic plasma jets (think Twisted Sister meets the Magnetic Fields.) Marscher, who performs under the pseudonym Cosmos II, notes on his Web site that he has composed "roughly 65 songs [... of which] about 20% have science themes." Yep, you can listen to some of those, too. To answer the obvious question, googling "black hole song" turns up "Songs from the Black Hole," Weezer's alleged space-rock concept album, which apparently compressed its sonic energy below the Schwarzschild radius, collapsed into a black hole and was presumed lost. (They should have read my story about pulling quantum information from a black hole.) Which all bolsters my suspicion that Weezer mastermind Rivers Cuomo owes some of his shtick to the band Too Much Joy, whose tune "Different Galaxies" bemoans, if memory serves, "the black hole of this conversation" that is "swallowing information exponentially." Break-ups are tough, I guess. Ok, enough of that icky pop culture. Here's some cold, hard science for you haters. You'll recall that last week I was at the April meeting of the American Physical Society in St. Louis. Well, one of the talks included some lovely simulations of plasma physics, which I'd like to share with you (click to start the videos): This simulation shows a vertical slice through the disk of dust and gas accreting onto a rapidly rotating black hole (kinda like half a donut viewed cut-side on). Colors show density: lowest in blue, highest in red. Magnetic fields (not shown) drive the accretion disk to flow into the black hole, and then wind-up and launch jets of low-density material from the top and bottom of the black hole. Courtesy of Jonathan McKinney This movie shows simulated fluctuations in magnetic energy during a high-speed collision between two shells of rarefied plasma. Researchers call such shocks collisionless because the magnetic fields scatter the charged plasma particles like a broom; as opposed to particles ricocheting like billiard balls as they do in atmosphere shock waves such as sonic booms. Collisionless shocks happen in relativistic jets, pulsar winds and supernova debris. Courtesy of Anatoly Spitkovsky
-- Edited by JR Minkel at 04/23/2008 5:15 PM -- Edited by JR Minkel at 04/24/2008 7:14 AM
