What are black hole jets made of? Many black holes in stellar systems are surely surrounded by disks of gas and plasma gravitationally pulled from a close binary star companion. Some of this material, after approaching the black hole , ends up being expelled from the star system in powerful jets emanating from the poles of the spinning black hole . Recent evidence indicates that these jets are composed not only electrons and protons , but also the nuclei of heavy elements such as iron and nickel . The discovery was made in system 4U1630-47 using CSIRO s Compact Array of radio telescopes in eastern Australia , and the European Space Agency 's Earth-orbiting XMM-Newton satellite. The 4U1630-47 star system is depicted above in an artist's illustration, with a large blue star on the right and jets emanating from a black hole in the center of the accretion disc on the left. Although the 4U1630-47 star system is thought to contain only a small black hole -- a few times the mass of our Sun -- the implications of the results may be larger: that black holes of larger sizes might also be emitting jets of massive nuclei into the cosmos.
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