Up to one-quarter of the radiation in the universe emitted since the Big Bang comes from material falling toward supermassive black holes - including supermassives that power quasars, the brightest known objects.

For decades, however, scientists have struggled to understand how black holes, the darkest objects in the universe, can be responsible for such prodigious amounts of radiation.

The new Chandra data give the first clear explanation for what drives this process: magnetic fields.

Chandra observed a system in the Milky Way, known as GRO J1655-40, where a black hole is pulling material from a companion star into a disk.

"By intergalactic standards J1655 is in our backyard, so we can use it as a scale model to understand how all black holes work, including the monsters found in quasars," said Jon M. Miller of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Miller's paper on the phenomenon was published in the June 22 issue of Nature.

Gravity alone is not enough to cause gas in a disk around a black hole to lose energy and fall in at the rates required by observations. The gas somehow must lose orbital angular momentum before it can spiral inward. Without such an effect, matter could remain in orbit around a black hole for a very long time.

Scientists have long thought magnetic turbulence could generate friction in a gaseous disk and drive a wind from the disk that carries angular momentum outward, allowing the gas to fall inward.

Using Chandra, Miller and his team found the evidence for the role of magnetic forces in the black hole accretion process. The X-ray spectrum - the number of X-rays at different energies - showed the speed and density of the wind from J1655's disk corresponded to computer simulation predictions for magnetically-driven winds.

The spectral fingerprint also ruled out the two other major competing theories to winds driven by magnetic fields.

"In 1973, theorists came up with the idea that magnetic fields could drive the generation of light by gas falling onto black holes," said co-author John Raymond of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. "Now, over 30 years later, we finally may have convincing evidence."

This deeper understanding of how black holes accrete matter also teaches astronomers about other properties of black holes, including how they grow.

"Just as a doctor wants to understand the causes of an illness and not merely the symptoms, astronomers try to understand what causes phenomena they see in the universe," said co-author Danny Steeghs, also of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center.

"By understanding what makes material release energy as it falls onto black holes, we may also learn how matter falls onto other important objects," Steeghs added.

In addition to accretion disks around black holes, magnetic fields may play an important role in disks detected around young sun-like stars where planets are forming, as well as ultra-dense objects called neutron stars.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for the agency's Science Mission Directorate. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center, Cambridge, Mass.

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