Outflows and Jets
Outflows and Jets
This chapter looks at the presence of outflows or jets, a somewhat unexpected feature of accretion flows. There is strong observational evidence that some fraction of the infalling material reverses course near the accreting object and is shot out perpendicularly to the accretion disk. In some cases, narrow collimated beams of emission are observed emerging from the central-most regions of galaxies and continuing across the whole of the galaxy, depositing their energy hundreds of kiloparsecs away from their origin. These phenomena are sometimes described as jets “emerging” from a black hole. This parlance is misleading—the jets do not, and indeed could not, emerge from inside the event horizon. Rather, some mechanism redirects the energy generated by the accretion process into a fraction of the infalling material and provides enough bulk kinetic energy for the material to escape the accretion process before the material enters the event horizon.
Keywords: outflows, jets, accretion flows, collimated emission beams, event horizon, infalling material, kinetic energy, black holes
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