Scientists trace 3,000-light year cosmic jet to first black hole ever imaged
Scientists have tracked a 3,000-light-year-long cosmic jet stretching from the first black hole ever imaged toward its likely source point, aided by the “significantly improved coverage” of the global Event Horizon Telescope, according to a new study published this week.
The findings, published Wednesday in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics,” could help determine exactly where and how black holes eject massive cosmic jets that travel at nearly the speed of light.
M87 is a supermassive black hole located in the Messier 87 Galaxy, approximately 55 light-years from Earth and 6.5 billion times more massive than the sun.
The first image of M87 was made public in 2019, after data was collected by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2017.
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Scientists have traced the 3,000-light-year-long cosmic jet from the first black hole ever imaged to its source, aided by the “significantly improved coverage” of the global Event Horizon Telescope, according to a new study published this week. (Hubble Telescope/NASA)
NASA’s Dr. In a video about the discovery of the black hole, Padi Boyd explained that the black hole is not only supermassive, but also “active.” “Only a few percent are active at any given time. Do they turn on and then turn off? That’s an idea… We know that when you launch a jet there are very high magnetic fields. So this image is observational evidence that what we’ve been seeing for a while is actually being launched by a jet bound to the supermassive black hole at the center of M87.”
According to Scientific American and Space.com, M87 both sucks in gas and dust from the environment and spews powerful jets of charged particles from its poles, forming the jet stream.
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“This work represents the first step towards combining theoretical ideas about jet launch with direct observations,” Saurabh, team leader at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, said in a statement. space.com.
The first image of the M87 black hole taken by the Event Horizon Telescope and appeared in 2019. (National Science Foundation via Getty Images)
He added: “Determining where the jet might originate and how it connects to the black hole’s shadow is an important piece of the puzzle and points to a better understanding of how the central engine works.”
The Event Horizon Telescope includes a global network of eight radio observatories capable of detecting radio waves from astronomical objects such as galaxies and black holes that come together to form an Earth-sized telescope.
Elliptical galaxy M87 is home to several trillion stars, a supermassive black hole, and a family of approximately 15,000 globular star clusters. (NASA, ESA and the Hubble Legacy Team (STScI/AURA); Acknowledgments: P. Cote (Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics) and E. Baltz (Stanford University))
The Event Horizon refers to the boundary of a black hole from which light cannot escape, according to the National Science Foundation.
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The findings were obtained after examining data from the Event Horizon Telescope in 2021, but the study’s authors added: “While this conclusion is robust under the assumptions and tests made, definitive validation and more precise constraints will require future EHT observations with higher precision and improved mid-baseline coverage through additional stations and expanded frequency range.”
