Chandra Release - October 14, 2020

Visual Description: Quasar Survey

A study using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes reveals the key role that regions of diffuse hot gas threaded with powerful magnetic fields - called a black hole "corona" - play in dictating whether the system creates a jet. This artist's illustration depicts a supermassive black hole as a black sphere at the center, with a transparent blue corona, threaded by magnetic fields (white squiggly lines). The corona lies above a much denser disk of cloudy material (colored in red and yellow), swirling around and falling towards the black hole. Jets of white colored material are blasting away from the black hole and corona in opposite directions. Supermassive black hole jets can inject huge amounts of energy into their surroundings and strongly influence the evolution of their environments. Previously, scientists realized that a supermassive black hole needs to be spinning rapidly to drive strong jets - but not all rapidly spinning black holes have jets.