This image shows two high speed lobes of 50 million degree gas 5 trillion kilometers apart on opposite sides of a binary black hole system.

Published 12. Oktober 2021 at 504 × 481 in This image shows two high speed lobes of 50 million degree gas 5 trillion kilometers apart on opposite sides of a binary black hole system.

The lobes of hot gas observed on either side of the black hole (shown in the illustration, lower right) are due to the pileup of blobs of hot gas ejected at a quarter of the speed of light from the vicinity of the black hole. Material is ejected from this disk in narrow jets that slowly wobble or precess around a circle (represented by blue circular arrow), from the sketched location of the jet at one extreme to the dotted white line at another. As the material slows down, it gets rear-ended by other blobs. This high-speed collision produces the lobes of hot gas.