Relativistic jet facts for kids

Relativistic jet. This picture shows the area around an active galaxy's center. Here, super-hot gas called plasma is squeezed into powerful jets that shoot out from the poles of a supermassive black hole.

The Elliptical galaxy M87 shoots out a relativistic jet. This amazing view was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Relativistic jets are incredibly powerful streams of super-hot gas, called plasma. These jets move at speeds very close to the speed of light. They are shot out from the giant black holes found at the center of some active galaxies. These include radio galaxies and quasars, which are super bright objects in space.

Jets can also come from black holes that are much smaller, like those formed from massive stars or neutron stars. These amazing jets can stretch for thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of light years across space!

When something moves almost as fast as light, special rules of physics called the special theory of relativity become very important. Scientists are still trying to fully understand how these jets are made and what exactly they are made of. The stuff inside the jets might even be different from one jet to another.

The most powerful jets come from the supermassive black holes at the heart of galaxies. Smaller, but still very fast, jets can come from neutron stars and other stellar black holes. Even some binary star systems (two stars orbiting each other) can have weaker jets, though these don't move as close to the speed of light.

Scientists believe that these relativistic jets are key to understanding how incredibly powerful explosions called gamma-ray bursts happen. These jets are some of the fastest things we know of in the universe. They move at speeds over 99.995% of the speed of light!

Images for kids

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  The pulsar IGR J11014-6103, which is a spinning neutron star, with its nebula and jet. It formed from a supernova explosion.

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  This X-ray image of Centaurus A shows its powerful relativistic jet.

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  The M87 jet as seen by the Very Large Array using radio frequency waves. This view is larger and rotated compared to the image above.

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  A near-UV image from the Hubble Legacy Archive showing the relativistic jet in 3C 66B.

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  In the galaxy NGC 3862, you can see an extragalactic jet of material moving almost at the speed of light. Look at the three o'clock position in the image.

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  Some of the jets in HH 24-26. This area has the highest number of jets known anywhere in the sky!