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The NASA telescope captured the entire black hole galaxy at an incredible distance of 55 million light-years from Earth – 323,324,400,000,000,000 miles. On April 10 this year, the scientists behind the EHT (Event Horizon Telescope) collaboration confirmed the existence of black holes with a single photo. Until then, black holes were a purely theoretical proposition because of their undetectable nature. But an intense effort to map the black hole of the Messier 87 galaxy (M87) gave an image of the black hole's boundary or the horizon of its events.
NASA has now put the magnitude of the discovery into perspective by showing how small the black hole is compared to the rest of the galaxy.
The US Space Agency said: "This image of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the elliptical galaxy Messier 87, the home galaxy of the supermassive black hole recently imitated by the Event Horizon telescope.
"The infrared view of Spitzer shows a faint trace of a jet of material spurting to the right of the galaxy – a feature that was previously one of the key indicators of the existence of a hole supermassive black in the center of the galaxy.
"The shock wave created by this jet is more important in the image."
READ MORE: The photo of the black hole explains: How did the scientists take the picture?
The brilliant light trail from the center of the image is a so-called relativistic jet.
Relativistic jets are clusters of ionized material coming out of a black hole at a speed close to that of light.
When a black hole sucks matter toward its event horizon, so-called accretion disks form around gravity wells.
With enough time and accumulated matter, the black hole will eject a beam of light hundreds or even thousands of kilometers at a time.
READ MORE: Einstein was right: how the very first black hole image confirms the century-old cosmic theory
In this case, NASA stated that the jet was heading almost directly to Earth, but that it was offset enough so that we could see it clearly.
NASA explained: "In 1918, astronomer Heber Curtis noticed for the first time" a curious right ray "extending from the center of the galaxy.
"This luminous jet, which seems to extend to the right of the galaxy, is visible in multiple wavelengths of light, from radio waves to X-rays.
"The jet is produced by a disc of material that rotates rapidly around the black hole and spits in opposite directions away from the galaxy.
READ MORE: What would happen if the Earth entered a black hole?
"When the particles in the jet impact the interstellar medium – the sparse material filling the space between the stars in M87 -, they create a shock wave that radiates in the lengths of infrared and radio light, but not in the light visible.
There is a second stream of material to the left of the black hole location on the galaxy photo.
But the jet is moving away from us so fast that it has become virtually invisible at all wavelengths.
NASA said: "But the shock wave that it creates in the interstellar medium is still visible here."
When the original photo of the EHT black hole was published, NASA congratulated the international collaboration for its realization.
Paul Hertz, director of astrophysics at NASA headquarters in Washington, said: "This is an extraordinary feat for the EHT team.
"Years ago we thought we had to build a very large space telescope to image a black hole.
"By making radiotelescopes around the world work together as a single instrument, the EHT has achieved this, decades in advance."
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