The line in treasure planet: “Does and active galactic nucleus have superluminal jets?” Well, does it? what does this mean?

Question

Edit: does *an* active.
Sorry, typo. I’m tired

In: 5

Answer 1

It can, but technically no.

First of all, superluminal means faster than light but thats impossible (I’m assuming vacuum, otherwise you go down a rabbit hole of Cherenkov radiation).

Interestingly enough, it can appear superluminal. it depends on your angle of the beam and the true speed of the particles in the beam. To work this out you would have to do some calculations and with relativistic speed, and in extreme cases the apparent speed could reach velocities of 10x the speed of light.

Answer 2

Not a scientist but afaik this is basically just gibberish.

I would assume a galactic nucleus is just, the center of the galaxy, in ours that’s a supermassive black hole. I’m not sure how exactly you would define “active” or “inactive” here.

What this seems to be asking asking is if the jets of plasma that orbit the black hole (called the accretion disk), are moving faster than light (superluminal).

Which is a question that makes basically zero sense, particularly with the choice of vocabulary. There’s no reason to distinguish the black hole at the center of a galaxy from any other black hole, and you’d probably be asking about what’s beyond the event horizon, not the stuff in orbit around it, for which there’s no reason to believe could exceed the speed of light, particularly since it’s still visible.

This is just a bunch of science terms mad libbed together for the sake of the movie.