The light from the base of the jet takes much longer to reach us than light from the end, so the waves appear to travel faster than light. Their superluminal appearance is actually a well known effect due to the fact that the waves are traveling near the speed of light with the jet pointed mostly in our direction. That doesn’t mean the waves actually are breaking the light barrier. In the paper, they are referred to as superluminal Alfvén waves, because they appear to travel faster than light. In a recent paper in the Astrophysical Journal, these Alfvén waves have been observed. As the black hole wobbles, the energy of the oscillations most easily travel along the jet, producing these waves. These transverse waves are known as Alfvén s-waves. When jets of ionized plasma interact with magnetic fields, transverse waves can travel along the ionized jet similar to the way waves travel along a whip.
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