Neutrons, rotating black holes, and a galactic PeVatron at the center of the Milky Way
Galactic black holes are cosmic mitochondria, powerhouses of the universe. Most of the energy these supermassive black holes produce comes from the material surrounding them: superheated plasma in their accretion disks interacting with tremendous magnetic fields. But there is a more direct way to extract energy from a black hole. It's known as the Penrose process, and a new study asks whether we…
The center of the Milky Way hosts a galactic PeVatron, a powerful source of extremely high-energy particles. At its core is a supermassive black hole, Sgr A*, which can extract energy directly through a process called the Penrose process. This mechanism, proposed by Roger Penrose in 1969, involves extracting energy from a rotating black hole and decreasing its total mass.
The process relies on the ergosphere, a region around the black hole where space is dragged by its rotation. This frame-dragging effect is strongest near the black hole, creating a boundary beyond which objects cannot escape. If a neutron enters this ergosphere and decays, it can release an energy kick through a magnetic interaction, accelerating protons to PeV energies.
These Protons would then escape the ergosphere and collide with surrounding gas, producing intense gamma rays and high-energy neutrinos. Although current technology cannot detect these faint signals, future upgrades to observatories like HAWC and IceCube should be capable of observing them. This potential discovery could provide evidence of the Penrose process and demonstrate that black holes can lose mass.
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