Surprisingly powerful jets kicked out by black holes may be down to their counter-spin
Black holes are messy eaters. As they gorge on matter, they spew some of it out as jets. These jets play an important role in the evolution of the surrounding region because they heat up huge volumes of gas, preventing it from condensing to form stars. But no one knows why some jets are more powerful than others. Using X-ray observations, a team led by Daniel Evans of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge studied the region around a black hole called 3C 33, which spins in the opposite direction to its orbiting discs of dust and gas. Over time, matter falling into a black hole is supposed to persuade it to rotate in the same direction as its disc, so counter-rotating black holes are thought to be rare. Read more
Title: Suzaku Observations of the Radio Galaxy 3C 33 Authors: Daniel A. Evans (1), James N. Reeves (2), Martin J. Hardcastle (3), Ralph P. Kraft (4), Julia C. Lee (4), Shanil N. Virani (5) ((1) MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, (2) Keele University, (3) University of Hertfordshire, College Lane, (4) Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, (5) Yale University)
We present results from a new 100-ks Suzaku observation of the nearby radio galaxy 3C 33, and investigate the nature of absorption, reflection, and jet production in this source. We model the 2-70 keV nuclear continuum with a power law that is absorbed either through one or more layers of pc-scale neutral material, or through a modestly ionised pc-scale obscurer. The expected signatures of reflection from a neutral accretion disk are absent in 3C 33: there is no evidence of a relativistically blurred Fe K \alpha emission line, and no Compton reflection hump above 10 keV. We discuss the implications of this for the nature of jet production in 3C 33.