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Even though black holes themselves let almost nothing escape, the areas just around them听emit powerful jets of plasma and energy. The blasts听are some of brightest places in the universe听and may form with the help of strange particles that pull energy from black holes.

In the area around a black hole, fast-moving photons smash into one another, creating pairs of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, which form a swirling plasma. Kyle Parfrey at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and his colleagues built a set of simulations to model how these particles interact with the powerful electromagnetic fields around a black hole.

When a black holes rotates, it spins its magnetic field into huge twisted strands听that extend from its axis of rotation. As the field shoots outwards, it steals rotational energy from the black hole itself听and powers the jets.

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These new simulations modeled the plasma around the black hole much more precisely than previous work and uncovered a surprise. The researchers found particles around the black holes that听appear to have negative energy when viewed from far away because of relativistic effects. When they fall into the black hole, they seem to impart听it with negative energy, which has the practical effect of pulling energy from the black hole and supplying it to the jets.

鈥淚f you were right next to a particle, you wouldn鈥檛 see anything weird about it. But to a distant observer, it looks like it has negative energy,鈥� says Parfrey. 鈥淵ou鈥檙e left with this strange case where if it falls into the black hole, it will cause the mass and the rotation to decrease.鈥�

These negative-energy particles were predicted by Roger Penrose in 1971, so their existence is not shocking, but the sheer amount of energy that the simulations showed they can extract from a black hole is, says Parfrey. The extra energy from these particles falling into the black hole was comparable to the energy generated by the twisting magnetic fields, so they may be equally important to the process of powering the jets.