Scientists recreate black hole jets in lab to solve mystery
Scientists have managed to recreate plasma "fireballs" in the lab, hoping to solve why some gamma rays from deep space just vanish before reaching us.
Led by Oxford and using CERN's powerful accelerator, the team mimicked the wild jets that shoot out of galaxies with supermassive black holes—think of it as bringing a piece of the universe into a test tube.
The experiment showed that the cosmic jets are surprisingly steady
Instead of unstable beams causing gamma rays to disappear (as older theories suggested), the experiment showed these cosmic jets are surprisingly steady and only make weak magnetic fields.
The real culprit? It might be faint intergalactic magnetic fields left over from the early universe, quietly messing with gamma rays on their journey.
With new observatories like the Cherenkov Telescope Array coming up, we're about to get an even closer look at how these mysterious forces shape what we see in space.