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I didn’t think Mossad admitted its involvement in “Beepergate“: the dissemination among Hezbollah of pagers and walkie-talkies that exploded on a signal last September.  It was key in demoralizing Hezbollah as well as eroding its power, and was cleverly targeted to avoid collateral damage. Apparently now we know that Mossad did this, since two ex-Mossad agents admitted it, and their story was shown on “60 Minutes” this week. It’s also recounted in the Times of Israel.

Here’s the 60 Minutes episode. What’s new: the walkie-talkies were disseminated ten years ago, but weren’t triggered until a few months ago. Since walkie-talkies are used only in battle, Mossad began to weaponize pagers as well. A series of shell companies in Taiwan and Hungary were set up to sell the devices to Hezbollah (they had exploding batteries) while completely masking Israel’s involvement.Multiple tests were done by Mossad to ensure that only the carrier of the pager (a Hezbollah fighter) would be injured. A big internet campaign was mounted to tout the advantages of the exploding beepers, which were larger and thus more cumbersome than conventional beepers.

To get the pagers only into the hands of Hezbollah, Mossad hired the woman who usually sold pagers to the terrorists. In toto, 30 Lebanese died and 3,000 were injured, almost all of them fighters. Yes, a few civilians were hurt, including children. But the vast majority of those injured were terrorists. All in all, the targeted episode was quite successful. It didn’t single-handedly bring about the cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel, but Hezbollah and its controlling state, Iran, have been set back on their heels.

The Toi article pretty much replicates what’s in the video, but I’ll emphasize one bit:

the psychological effect the attack had on Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was a “tipping point of the war,” Gabriel said.

He asserted that the veteran Hezbollah leader saw pagers exploding and injuring people who were right next to him in his bunker. Asked how he knows that, Gabriel said, “It’s a strong rumor.”

Two days after the attack, Nasrallah gave a speech.

People watch the speech of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as they sit in a cafe in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

“If you look at his eyes, he was defeated,” Gabriel said. “He already lose the war. And his soldier look at him during that speech. And they saw a broken leader.”

In the days after the attack, Israel’s air force hit targets across Lebanon, killing thousands. Nasrallah was assassinated when Israel dropped bombs on his bunker.

By November, the war between Israel and Hezbollah, a byproduct of the deadly attack by Hamas-led terrorists in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, ended with a ceasefire.

Even given all the precautions, Leslie Stahl has the moxie to ask one of the ex Mossad agents whether this episode might make Israel worry about its “moral reputation.” Some question!

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Within nearly every galaxy is a supermassive black hole. The beast at the heart of our galaxy contains the mass of millions of suns, while some of the largest supermassive black holes can be more than a billion solar masses. For years, it was thought that these black holes grew in mass over time, only reaching their current size after a billion years or more. But observations from the Webb telescope show that even the youngest galaxies contain massive black holes. So how could supermassive black holes grow so large so quickly? The key to the answer could be the powerful jets black holes can produce.

Although it seems counterintuitive, it is difficult for a black hole to consume matter and grow. The gravitational pull of a black hole is immensely strong, but the surrounding matter is much more likely to be trapped in orbit around the gravitational well than to fall directly in. To enter a black hole, material needs to slow down enough to fall inward. When a black hole has a jet of material speeding away from its polar region, this high-velocity plasma can pull rotational motion from the surrounding material, thus allowing it to fall into the black hole. For this reason, black holes with powerful jets also undergo the most powerful growth.

We can see many fast-growing black holes in the distant Universe as quasars, or active galactic nuclei. We know, then, that in the middle age of the cosmos, many supermassive black holes were gaining mass rapidly. One idea is that the youngest supermassive black holes also had active jets, which would allow them to gain a million solar masses or more quite quickly. But proving this is difficult.

The problem is that it’s extremely difficult to observe jets from the earliest period of the cosmos. Light from that distant time is so redshifted that their once brilliant beacon has become dim radio light. Before this recent study, the most distant jet we observed had a redshift of z = 6.1, meaning it traveled for nearly 12.8 billion years to reach us. In this new study, the team discovered a blazar with a redshift of z = 7.0, meaning it comes from a time when the Universe was just 750 million years old.

A blazar occurs when the jet of a supermassive black hole is lined up to be pointed directly at us. Since we’re looking directly into the beam, we see the jet at its most powerful. Blazars normally allow us to calculate the true intensity of a jet, but in this case, the redshift is so strong that our conclusions must be a bit more subtle.

How distant jets could be Doppler magnified. Credit: Bañados, et al

One possibility is that the jet of this particular supermassive black hole really is pointed directly our way. Based on this, the black hole is growing so quickly that it would easily gain more than a million solar masses within the first billion years of time. But it would be extremely rare for a black hole jet to point directly at us from that distance. So statistically, that would mean there are many more early black holes that are just as active and growing just as quickly. They just aren’t aligned for us to observe.

Another possibility is that the blazar isn’t quite aligned in our direction, but the cosmic expansion of space and time has focused its energy toward us over 12.9 billion years. In other words, the blazar may appear more energetic than it actually is, thanks to relativistic cosmology. But if that is the case, then the jet of this black hole is less energetic but still powerful. And statistically, that would mean most early black holes are equally powerful.

So this latest work tells us that either there was a fraction of early black holes that grew to beasts incredibly fast, or that most black holes grew quickly, beginning at a time even earlier than we can observe. In either case, it is clear that early black holes created jets, and these jets allowed the first supermassive black holes to appear early in cosmic time.

Reference: Bañados, Eduardo, et al. “A blazar in the epoch of reionization.” Nature Astronomy (2024): 1-9.

The post How Did Black Holes Grow So Quickly? The Jets appeared first on Universe Today.