Biggest ever seen black hole jets; blasting plasma well beyond their own galaxy

If you consider the surface of the water as a 2D plane, the bubble expands into a third dimension perpendicular to the others. The bubble's surface is made of the same water as the surface of the pond, and there is no hard boundary between them. The bubble pushes part of the 2D plane into the third dimension, which results in the water having more surface area than the total possible area of the 2D plane.

Area (space) has been created without creating matter or energy. The surface is simply extended into an extra spatial dimension.

The way I like to interpret the big bang is as a higher dimensional structure folding or knotting itself such that a bubble is forced into a 3D space. The bubble expands and thus creates more volume than is possible in the lower-dimensional surface the bubble was formed on. This is my ill-informed interpenetration of M-theory.

Dunno why, but much of mathematics and the universe in general makes much more sense to me when viewed in terms of dimensionality. Our universe is 'just' a 4D slice of a higher dimensional structure, and I find a certain kind of beauty in that. In another life, I'd have been a string theorist

In the accretion disk, friction and collision between fragments, molecules, atoms cause things to reach incredible temperatures. The matter gets so incredibly hot that the radiation it emits is actually enough to offset the black hole's gravity and prevents more matter falling in faster. The innermost section of the disk is so ludicrously hot that matter dissociates into subatomic particles and becomes a plasma. This plasma is very energetic and moves very fast and creates a very strong magnetic field. This interacts with the electric field produced by the black hole. This plus the stupendous distortion of spacetime caused by the black hole's rotation causes the magnetic fields to twist up tightly in a vortex about the axis of rotation.

Again, the energies involved are impossibly huge. We're converting matter into energy at something like 95% efficiency. Just through gravity!

Because the plasma is so highly charged, the magnetic vortices are so powerful, and the twist is so tight, it essentially creates a particle accelerator on a galactic scale. Plasma from the accretion disk is sucked into the vortex by the insane magnetic fields. Particles spin round and round in the vortex until they get as close to light speed as is possible. The vortex also confines the jet into a cone, blasting out charged particles with impossible velocities along the axis of rotation.

These jets convert matter into pretty much every kind of energy. Radiation across the entire spectrum, lightspeed particles, magnetic and electric fields. It's really impossible to overstate just how much energy these things throw out. It's just a few degrees shy of a sustained matter/antimatter reaction on stellar scales running for millenia.

These things can extinguish entire galaxies. Not sterilize, extinguish. They can blast away any free gas in a galaxy, immediately and irrevocably halting star and planet formation. Not even just in the host galaxy. Exceptionally powerful quasars can extinguish galaxies lightyears away.

And again, this is only driven by gravity. Nothing else. All of the impossibly huge energies are produced by nothing more than matter falling into a gravity well.

Most quasars emit enough gamma radiation to sterilize all of space within a hundred lightyears or so.