Black holes eat negative energy and vomit out huge powerful jets

Kyle Parfrey

By Leah Crane

Even though black holes themselves let almost nothing escape, the areas just around them emit powerful jets of plasma and energy. The blasts are some of brightest places in the universe and may form with the help of strange particles that pull energy from black holes.

In the area around a black hole, fast-moving photons smash into one another, creating pairs of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, which form a swirling plasma. Kyle Parfrey at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and his colleagues built …