Do the jets of gas in some galaxies have anything to do with rotating black holes?

Not directly.

We think that all of the fireworks that come from active galaxies such as the ones that are ejecting material from their cores, arises in as yet unknown physical conditions within large, orbiting disks of gas, dust and stars. These disks are believed to be gravitationally anchored to supermassive black holes the same way our Earth is 'anchored' to the sun. The disks orbit the supermassive black holes at thousands of kilometers per second with the black hole at the center.

Matter spirals into the black hole and lots of frictional energy is generated which ionizes the gas to thousands of degrees. This plasma then interacts with magnetic fields trapped in the disk, or in the central black hole, and gets ejected in polar jets at nearly the speed of light, much like matter on the sun is ejected in solar flares by magnetic fields as they re-connect.

The central black hole is probably of the 'rotating' variety since it is accreting material from the orbiting disk which already has considerable angular momentum. But theorists do not feel that the immediate properties of the rotating black hole have much to do with the activity way out in the orbiting disk that gives rise to the 'bipolar' jets and nuclear emissions that radio astronomers have been mapping for decades. Even the best Hubble images only see material many light years distant from the central black hole, so these events and structures must be caused by some other mechanism having more to do with the local dynamics of the accretion disk rather than what the black hole itself looks like at a vastly smaller scale.

 

One phenomenon that astronomers have been able to detect is 'frame dragging' which is predicted by general relativity around rotating black holes. Matter that falls within 1-2 radii of the black hole enters a type of space where no stable, or stationary, orbits are possible like the kinds that earth satellites are in. This kind of spacetime affects the timing of the micro-bursts that the matter emits, and X-ray studies of 'flicker noise' in the X-rays by the NASA X-Ray Timing Explorer satelite have been able to to see this phenomenon.


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