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A supermassive black hole and the bright beam it emits have been imaged together for the first time in an exciting breakthrough that could shed light on the mysteries of the universe.
Astronomers hope their groundbreaking observations of the massive object at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87) can help reveal how black holes feed and what allows them to launch energetic jets of material through intergalactic space.
The image shows for the first time the shadow of a black hole and what the powerful jet launching from its event horizon looks like.
“We know that jets are ejected from the region around black holes, but we still don’t fully understand how this actually happens,” said lead author Dr Ru-Sen Lu of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory.
“To study this directly, we need to observe the origin of the jet as close as possible to the black hole.”
First Look: A supermassive black hole and the bright beam it emits have been imaged together for the first time in an exciting breakthrough that could shed light on the mysteries of the universe
First directly imaged by humanity, the supermassive black hole at the center of M87 is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun and is 55 million light-years from Earth.
Previous images of it had captured the beam it emits and the supermassive black hole itself, but not the two together.
“This new image completes the picture by showing the area around the black hole and the jet at the same time,” said Jae-Young Kim of South Korea’s Kyungpook National University and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.
Most galaxies have massive objects like this at their heart, which act as massive sinkholes, swallowing up anything that crosses their path.
As a result, the feeding monsters launch jets of matter at nearly the speed of light, which scientists believe are propelled by the rotation of the black hole itself.
However, it is still unclear where exactly these jets come from.
Scientists believe it could be close to the black hole’s event horizon or just beyond it in the Ergoregion, a zone where space-time itself rotates with the object.
The new image of supermassive black hole M87 was created using 2018 data from the Global Millimeter VLBI Array (GMVA), the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), and the Greenland Telescope (GLT).
It shows a powerful jet contacting the matter around a supermassive black hole, but does not pinpoint its exact origin.
The photo also reveals what scientists call the black hole’s shadow.
This is created when matter floats around the black hole and glows as it heats up, creating the bright gold ring visible in the historic first image of the M87 sample taken by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) in 2017.
Follow-up research using artificial intelligence machine learning revealed the black hole in full resolution earlier this month, the first of its kind.
Astronomers hope their groundbreaking observations of the black hole at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87) can help reveal how black holes behave and what allows them to launch energetic jets of material through intergalactic space. An artist’s impression is shown
Analysis: The image shows for the first time the shadow of a black hole and what the powerful jet launched from its event horizon looks like
The new image shows a powerful jet connecting to the matter around a supermassive black hole, but doesn’t pinpoint the exact origin
At the center of this golden ring is total darkness, the shadow of the black hole.
The new image also differs from the 2017 image because it shows this region in longer wavelengths of light, changing what astronomers can visualize.
“At this wavelength, we can see how the beam emerges from the emission ring around the central supermassive black hole,” says Thomas Krichbaum of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.
The size of the black hole’s ring in this new image is also 50 percent larger than in the EHT image, which scientists say suggests it is swallowing up matter faster than previously believed.
Breakthrough: In 2017, the black hole M87 was the first to be directly imaged by astronomers
Wow: Earlier this month, scientists revealed another fascinating glimpse of the M87 object with the release of the first-ever full-resolution photo of a supermassive black hole
“This is the first image where we can pinpoint where the ring is, relative to the powerful jet escaping from the central black hole,” said Dr. Kazunori Akiyama of MIT’s Haystack Observatory, who developed the imaging software used to make the black hole.
“Now we can dig deeper into questions like how particles are accelerated and heated, and many other mysteries surrounding the black hole.”
Eduardo Ros, also of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, said astronomers now plan to observe the region around the black hole M87 at different radio wavelengths to further develop their understanding of the jets it emits.
“The next few years will be exciting as we get to learn more about what’s happening near one of the most mysterious regions in the universe,” he added.
The new research is published in the journal Nature.