New photo of black hole sheds light on details of its surrounding magnetic fields

Scientists who revealed the very first photograph of a black hole added polarized light to the image, offering a more detailed look at its magnetic fields. According to New Scientist, the group of astronomers working on the Event Horizon Telescope project (EHT) has released a polarized image of the black hole which they first captured in 2019. The new photo offers a much sharper view of the black hole, especially the swirling magnetic fields surrounding the edge of the cosmic body, this which can reveal more about the jet process in space.

The group’s most recent study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, presents new findings on how the supermassive black hole, located in the center of the galaxy M87, 55 million light years away, launches powerful jets of matter from its core. The formation of these jets has long been a mystery to researchers, but the newly illuminated magnetic fields may provide important clues.

Image Credit: Event Horizon Telescope

“Polarized light has these curved curves like a spiral,” said Sara Issaoun, member of the EHT team at Radboud University in the Netherlands. “This tells us that the magnetic field around the black hole is ordered, and it’s really important because only an ordered magnetic field can launch jets – a scrambled magnetic field cannot do that.”

The Event Horizon telescope itself is actually made up of eight telescopes that are linked together to create a giant radio telescope that revolves around the Earth and uses the rotation of the planet to help capture incredible images that can be examined on the ground. . In this case, the EHT team measured polarized light near the black hole to determine the strength of its magnetic field.

As the report notes, the black hole’s magnetic field reading came out somewhere between 1 and 30 gauss (units of magnetic induction), or “up to about 50 times the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field measured at the poles of the Earth. planet, where it is strongest. ”This measurement has helped researchers better understand how the black hole and its jets work.

“This jet process is totally amazing – something the size of our solar system can project a jet that pierces entire galaxies and even quarters of galaxies,” Issaoun explained. “Now we are really seeing the magnetic field near the black hole for the first time, and it connects it to the jet, which is the most powerful process in the universe.”

In the future, scientists collaborating on this program plan to expand their research by adding a few more telescopes to the EHT network to gather more information about the black hole and its jetting production. Specifically, they hope to learn more about the process of astrophysical jets created by the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy.

Towards the end of 2019, NASA released a black hole simulation that showed how gravity distorts light in a black hole, and then, a few months later, in early 2020, scientists detected the biggest explosion in the world. galaxy, what we thought. come from a supermassive black hole. To learn more about black holes, read how it seemed to break the law of physics itself.

Adele Ankers is a freelance entertainment journalist. You can reach her on Twitter.