Related Experiment Video
Updated: Dec 10, 2025

Magnetically Induced Rotating Rayleigh-Taylor Instability
Published on: March 3, 2017
Magnetic Origin of Black Hole Winds Across the Mass Scale
Keigo Fukumura1, Demosthenes Kazanas2, Chris Shrader2,3
1James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA 22807.
Abstract:
Black hole accretion disks appear to produce invariably plasma outflows that result in blue-shifted absorption features in their spectra1. The X-ray absorption-line properties of these outflows are quite diverse, ranging in velocity from non-relativistic2 (~ 300 km/sec) to sub-relativistic3 (~ 0.1c where c is the speed of light) and a similarly broad range in the ionization states of the wind plasma2,4. We report here that semi-analytic, self-similar magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) wind models that have successfully accounted for the X-ray absorber properties of supermassive black holes5,6, also fit well the high-resolution X-ray spectrum of the accreting stellar-mass black hole, GRO J1655-40. This provides an explicit theoretical argument of their MHD origin (aligned with earlier observational claims)7 and supports the notion of a universal magnetic structure of the observed winds across all known black hole sizes.
Related Concept Videos
Detection of Black Holes
Their closest cousins are neutron stars, which are composed almost entirely of neutrons packed against each other, making them extremely dense. A neutron star has the same mass as the Sun but its diameter is only a few kilometers. Therefore, the escape velocity from their surface is close to the speed of light.
Not until the 1960s, when the first neutron...
Magnetic Fields
A magnetic field is defined by the force that a charged particle experiences...
Magnetic Field Of A Current Loop
Divergence and Curl of Magnetic Field
Magnetic Field due to Moving Charges
Consider a point charge moving with a constant velocity. Like the electric field, the magnetic field at any point is directly proportional to the magnitude of the charge and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the source point and the field point. However, unlike the electric field, the magnetic field is always perpendicular to the plane containing the line...
Magnetic Field Lines
Magnetic field lines follow several hard-and-fast rules:

