Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Physics Forum Black hole may be 'particle accelerator'

U.S. and Australian scientists said they have discovered how a black hole in the center of the galaxy is emitting gamma rays with extraordinary energies. Scientists said they were startled when they discovered in 2004 that the center of the Milky Way galaxy is emitting gamma rays with energies in the tens of trillions of electronvolts. But now astrophysicists at The University of Arizona, the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Australia's University of Adelaide said the black hole might be working like a cosmic particle accelerator, revving up protons that smash at incredible speeds into lower energy protons, creating high-energy gamma rays For the full story: Click Here .

That's an order of magnitude better than LHC will achieve. Hey, could we use gamma radiation is an intra-galactic 'radio beacon'? (That's hard to say with your tongue in your cheek)

Hi DA,

Ballantyne and crew have been doing some very interesting work concerning AGNs (active galactic nuclei.) I believe that AGNs will turn out to be very important to cosmologist and astrophysics. Perhaps some youngster will find a connection between these objects and, say, dark matter.

Here is a link to Ballantyne's pages at U of A:

http://www.physics.arizona.edu/~drb/

Many of his publication can be had there.

Dr. R.

Thanks.