Scientists observing the compact radio core of the galaxy M87 have discovered new details about the galaxy’s supermassive black hole. In this artist’s concept, a massive jet of black matter is seen rising up from the black hole’s center. The observations on which this illustration is based mark the first time that a jet and a black hole’s shadow have been imaged together, giving scientists new insight into how black holes can launch these powerful jets. , Photo Credit: Reuters
expanding on Historical first images of black holesScientists unveiled the first photo on Wednesday that shows violent events around one of these fiery cosmic behemoths, including the launching point of a massive jet of high-energy particles shooting outward into space.
The new image was obtained using 16 telescopes at various locations on Earth, essentially creating a planet-sized observation dish. The supermassive black hole pictured resides at the center of a relatively nearby galaxy called Messier 87, or M87, about 54 million light-years from Earth.
A light year is the distance that light travels in one year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
This black hole, with a mass of 6.5 billion times that of our Sun, was the subject of the first image of such an object released in 2019, which featured another black hole last year.
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Those images, which used to show just the darkness of the black hole and the rings of bright material sinking into it, and the new ones all result from observations using many radio telescopes around the world. But the new one emits light at a longer wavelength, expanding what can be seen.
Difficult to observe by their very nature, black holes are astronomical entities that exert a gravitational pull so strong that no matter or light can escape once within their grasp.
Most galaxies have formed around supermassive black holes. Some have been known to not only swallow up any surrounding material, but to shoot huge and blazingly bright jets of high-energy particles far into space—far beyond the galaxy they originated from.
The new image shows how the base of such a jet is joined by material swirling in a ring-like structure around the black hole.
For the first time, the entire system around a black hole has been captured in the image. It shows the base of a jet of hot plasma, a fuzzy ring of light from hot plasma falling into the black hole, and a central dark region – like a donut hole – created by the black hole’s presence. Plasma – the fourth state of matter after solid, liquid and gas – is material so hot that some or all of its atoms split into high-energy subatomic particles.
“The image outlines for the first time a connection between the central supermassive black hole and the accretion flow (material pulled inward) near the origin of the jet,” said astrophysicist Ru-Sen Lu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai. Did Study published in the journal Nature,
It may be practical to see the entire scene around a supermassive black hole.
“It helps to better understand the complex physics around black holes, how the jets are launched and accelerated, and how they flow into black holes,” said Thomas Krichbaum, astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Radio and co-author of the study. How are the inflow of matter and the outflow of matter related.” Astronomy in Germany.
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“This is what astronomers and astrobiologists have wanted to see for more than half a century,” said Kazunori Akiyama, astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Haystack Observatory and co-author of the study. “It’s the dawn of an exciting new era.”
Lu, Krichbaum and Akiyama are members of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, an international collaboration that began in 2012 with the goal of directly observing the black hole’s immediate environment. A black hole’s event horizon is the point beyond which anything — stars, planets, gas, dust, and electromagnetic radiation of all kinds — fades into oblivion.
The EHT project has obtained images of two supermassive black holes. The second – released last year – shows the one residing at the center of the Milky Way, called Sagittarius A* or Sgr A*.
“We expect a similar environment to exist for SGR A*,” Lu said.