New image of black hole reveals its ‘most mysterious’ feature

Astronomers have released the most detailed image of a black hole to date, the one that has revealed its “most mysterious” feature: the luminous jets of energy that shoot out over thousands of light years.

The new image from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration used polarized light – filtering it out, much like polarized sunglasses – to show the area around the black hole. And that, in turn, provided the sharpest look to date on these energy jets.

“Most of the material near the edge of a black hole falls off,” the collaboration said in a press release. “However, some of the surrounding particles escape moments before capture and are thrown far into space in the form of jets.”

This leads to jets of energy and matter that extend about 5,000 light years from the center, as shown in the new image, the very first detailed look at the region just outside the black hole:

Janna Levin, an astrophysicist and professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University, who is not on the EHT team, told the New York Times that the jets in the new image are essentially “a ray cannon. deadly and powerful astronomical spanning thousands of light years. ”

“The recently released polarized images are essential to understanding how the magnetic field allows the black hole to ‘eat’ matter and launch powerful jets,” said Andrew Chael, member of the EHT collaboration, Hubble member of NASA at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. Press release.

Launched in 2009, the EHT collaboration is a multinational effort involving some 300 scientists using a network of radio telescopes around the world to study black holes. Two years ago, the collaboration released the very first image of a black hole, a fuzzy ring that captured the public imagination.

The new polarized image offers an even clearer look at the object at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, or M87, about 55 million light years away and in the constellation Virgo as seen from Earth:

The next step can be more than just a picture.

“Even now, we are designing a next-generation EHT that will allow us to make the first black hole films,” said Sheperd Doeleman, founding director of the EHT collaboration, in a press release. “Stay tuned for real black hole cinema.