Astronomers capture first-ever direct image of black hole emitting powerful jet
Astronomers captured the first direct image of a supermassive black hole spewing a powerful jet out into the cosmos.
The supermassive black hole is at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, or M87, roughly 55 million light-years from Earth. It is 6.5 billion times larger than the Sun.
Much like the first-ever image of a black hole captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project in 2019, this new image was possible thanks to the combined data of multiple radio telescopes.
The first direct image of a black hole firing a high-energy jet
The impressive new image could shed new light on the behavior of black holes and the mechanism that allows them to propel massive energetic jets of material from their rings, or accretion discs, far into deep space.
“We know that jets are ejected from the region surrounding black holes, but we still do not fully understand how this actually happens,” lead study author Ru-Sen Lu, astronomer at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China, explained in a press statement. “To study this directly, we need to observe the origin of the jet as close as possible to the black hole.”
The observations of the M87 black hole and the powerful jet of material were taken back in 2018. Since then, the scientists behind the new image have been hard at work combining data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, the Greenland Telescope, and the Global Millimetre VLBI Array of telescopes across Europe and North America.
The researchers behind the new image published their findings in a recent paper in the journal Nature this week. They described how it shows, for the first time, the base of the jet connected to the matter swirling around a supermassive black hole.
Previous images, such as the EHT capture, had shown both features separately, but this is the first time a direct image showed the two linked together.
Shedding new light on the evolution of the cosmos
To capture their first-of-its-kind image, the researchers observed the black hole at a longer wavelength than the 2019 EHT image. “At this wavelength, we can see how the jet emerges from the ring of emission around the central supermassive black hole,” explained study coauthor Thomas Krichbaum, a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.
The international group of scientists behind the new observations hope their work will help to shed new light on the mysterious phenomena of jets shooting out of black holes. As black holes reside at the heart of most galaxies, their work will help better understand the cosmos’ evolution.
Source: Interesting Engineering
China vows to build a space station on the MOON by 2030 – up to four years before NASA
China vows to build a space station on the MOON by 2030 – up to four years before NASA
Astronomers capture first-ever direct image of black hole emitting powerful jet