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

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.