Live image of supermassive black hole ejecting matter

Astronomers used a virtual telescope the size of Earth to capture a jet of material ejected from the supermassive black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy.

The jet of material ejected from the M87 black hole is nearly as fast as the speed of light. Image: R.-S. Lu (SHAO), E. Ros (MPIfR), S. Dagnello (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

A new image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy is the first black hole ever directly imaged. The image reveals the moment the jet, traveling at nearly the speed of light, connects with matter swirling around the supermassive black hole before being sucked into its surface, in a process called accretion. Researchers detailed the image on April 26 in the journal Nature .

The previous image showed the jet and the supermassive black hole, but not side by side. “This new image completes the picture by showing the region around the black hole and the jet at the same time,” said astronomer Jae-Young Kim of Kyungpook National University in South Korea and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, who was part of the team.

The first historic image of the black hole M87, which is 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun and 55 million light years from Earth, was taken by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) in 2017 and released two years later. The new image of M87 and its jet comes from 2018 data from the Global Millimeter/submillimeter Array (GMVA), the Greenland Telescope, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), which together form a virtual Earth-sized device (similar to the EHT network).

Most or all large galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers. Some, like M87, consume large amounts of matter in the form of gas and dust, and even unlucky stars that get too close. The resulting jets are powerful, traveling at nearly the speed of light and can stretch for thousands of light-years, sometimes even beyond the boundaries of their host galaxies. But researchers still don’t understand how supermassive black holes do this. They need to look for the source of the jet as close to the black hole as possible, says Ru-Sen Lu, a scientist at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory.

In addition to proving that the jet originates from a supermassive black hole, the new image also shows the black hole’s shadow. As matter orbits a supermassive black hole at nearly the speed of light under the influence of its enormous gravity, the matter heats up and glows, creating the yellow ring seen in this image of M87 and the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). In the middle of the yellow halo is complete darkness. That is the black hole’s shadow.

The new image of M87 also differs from the EHT image in that it captures the region at a longer wavelength of light, which affects what astronomers can see. At this wavelength, they can see how the jets emerge from the emission ring around the supermassive black hole, says Thomas Krichbaum, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. The ring in the new image is 50 percent larger than the EHT image. This difference suggests that the M87 black hole is eating matter more quickly.

Using a network of telescopes, astronomers will try to understand how supermassive black holes eject powerful jets of matter. The observations will also help them explain the many complex processes that occur near black holes.

An Khang (According to Space )

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