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Many quasars shoot out jets in opposite directions that may extend for more than a million light years. One explanation for the jets is that a giant spinning black hole accumulates a spinning accretion disk in its equatorial plane from materials being drawn towards it by gravity. Friction and gravity supply the energy necessary to heat the disk to the point where a gas plasma forms and slides inwards along magnetic fields lines later to be hurled out by centrifugal forces as two jets in opposite directions.
The accretion disk is the major source of radiation--X-rays at its hot, innermost regions, and ultra-violet, visible, and infra-red radiation further out. Radio frequency emitting lobes may form where a quasar's jets terminate. Geoffrey Burbidge calculated that these lobes may have as much magnetic and kinetic energy as would be obtained by converting all the mass of ten million suns into pure energy.
Burbidge's calculation demonstrates that The Urantia Book's statement, "in these collisional episodes enormous masses of matter are suddenly converted into the rarest form of energy" is not just the wild imagination it would have appeared to be at the time of the printing of the book.
Some might argue that colliding black holes would simply result in bigger black holes. But perhaps a critical situation is reached when temperature and pressure conditions cause matter to disrupt yielding their most basic constituents which may not respond to gravity. Such an event would then convert gravitational implosion to rebound explosion. Once the fireworks are over, the revelators tell us that such devastating collisions become a thing of the past. Incidentally, the measured frequency of quasars in our vicinity is one in a million galaxies. Perhaps quasar activity is mainly an 'outer space' phenomenon.
The Urantia Papers inform us that the power directors and force organizers have these catastrophic collision things under control? And that it's all just part of a routine universal recycling program!
We are also informed that the running down of our universes is apparent and not real. Science rightly uses what it conceives to be the simplest explanation for known data. It sees an expanding universe and so assumes a beginning calculated by extrapolating backwards from the expansion rate. Rightly, it also assumes the universality of its observed laws of conservation of energy, from which it sees an eventual running down. Continuous creation and controlled energy flow are not measurable--not yet anyhow--and it is good science to stick with the observable.
It was in about 1955 that the New York Times carried a headline report that the size and age of the universe had just doubled. The reason for the report was a new estimate of the rate of expansion of the universe which also increased the estimate of its age from 2 billion to 4 billion years, about 10 billion years short of current estimates. And, at about the same time, The Urantia Book appeared on the bookshelves speaking of colliding black holes and continuous creation!! In 2003, it all seems plausible.
References.
Davies, Christine, "Let's Play Quantum Chess." New Scientist 158 (2137) 1998
Disney, M. "A New Look at Quasars." Scientific American, 278 (6) 1998
Thorne, K. "Black Holes and Time Warps." (W.W. Norton, London, 1994)
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