New Black Hole Image Reveals “Most Mysterious” Feature

Astronomers have released the most detailed image of a black hole to date, one that revealed its “most mysterious” feature: light jets of energy that have been missing for thousands of light years.

The new image from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration used polarized light – filtering it, just like polarized sunglasses – to show the area around the black hole. And, in turn, it provided the clearest view so far of those jets of energy.

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

This leads to jets of energy and matter extending about 5,000 light-years from the center, as shown in the new image, the 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 part of the EHT team, told The New York Times that the planes in the new image are essentially “a deadly astronomical pistol, powerful, extending by thousands of light years. ”

“The newly published polarized images are critical to understanding how the magnetic field allows black holes to ‘eat’ matter and launch powerful jets,” said Andrew Chael, a member of the EHT collaboration, a member of NASA’s Hubble Center for Theoretical Sciences. Princeton, press release.

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

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

The next step can be more than just an image.

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