NASA finds black holes play cosmic "seesaw" with space outflows
NASA's NICER telescope on the ISS just caught a black hole in a wild balancing act: it flips between blasting out high-energy jets and powerful X-ray winds, but never does both at once.
This "cosmic seesaw" was tracked for three years in a system called 4U 1630-472, where the two types of outflows always take turns—when jets are active, winds shut off, and vice versa.
What's going on—and why does it matter?
The black hole (about 10 times the mass of our Sun) feeds off a companion star, but even as its disk keeps filling up, only one kind of outflow gets to run at a time.
The real switch is controlled by changes in magnetic fields around the disk—not how much stuff falls in.
This self-regulating cycle helps recycle gas that galaxies need to make new stars, so it actually shapes how galaxies grow over time.
The study dropped January 5th in Nature Astronomy—pretty cool for anyone curious about how black holes quietly set the pace for entire galaxies.