

Mysterious mechanisms at play at the edge of the event horizon - dnetesn
http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1515/

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white-flame
"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.

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

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

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Tossrock
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.

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Pyxl101
Could this observation be related at all to the AMPS firewall theory?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_(physics)](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...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/black-hole-firewalls-
could-change-physics-forever/) (paywall)

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Udo
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.

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lisa_henderson
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](http://gawker.com/why-weve-decided-to-
organize-1698246231)

