Telescopes around the globe have teamed up to create unprecedented images of the M87 * supermassive black hole as it explodes into space at the speed of 99% light.
This is the same famous black hole that was captured by Event Horizon Telescope and revealed in 2019.
The first release was a spectacular achievement. It took many years of work and a series of radio telescopes that spanned the globe, combining their observations to imagine a region of space not much larger than the solar system 55 million light-years away.
Now, a team of scientists has added data from several telescopes on several wavelengths of light, each revealing different features of the M87 * black hole and the relativistic jet of plasma it throws into space.
“I knew that the first direct image of a black hole would be revolutionary,” said astronomer Kazuhiro Hada of Japan’s National Astronomical Observatory.
“But to make the most of this remarkable image, we need to know everything we can about the behavior of the black hole at that moment, observing the entire electromagnetic spectrum.”
There is a much larger black hole than what we see in the magnified image we see of the shadow and halo of the M87 * above. The supermassive black hole is active, escaping the material from the hot disk of dust and gases around it, which means that some quite complex things can happen.
One of these is the expulsion of relativistic jets launched from the poles of the black hole.
Nothing we can detect today can escape a black hole once it has crossed the critical proximity threshold, but not all the material in the accumulation disk that spins in an active black hole inevitably reaches beyond the horizon of events. A small part of it becomes somehow directed from the inner region of the accumulation disk to the poles, where it is thrown into space in the form of jets of ionized plasma, at speeds with a significant percentage of the speed of light.
Astronomers believe that the magnetic field of the black hole plays a role in this process. The lines of the magnetic field, according to this theory, act as a synchrotron that accelerates the material before launching it with extraordinary speed.
In the case of the M87 *, this is 99% of the speed of light – about as fast as relativistic planes can reach – and the jet we can see extends into space by about 5,000 light-years. The light it emits extends over the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from the smallest to the most energetic, so that observing it in a single wavelength band would mean missing some information about the energy of the structure.
So the team added data from telescopes that observe jets at multiple wavelengths, including the Hubble Space Telescope for optical light; Chandra X-ray Observatory and Swift X-ray Telescope; NuSTAR high-energy X-ray space telescope; Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory for Ultraviolet and Optical; and HESS, MAGIC, VERITAS and the Fermi-Large Area Telescope for gamma radiation.
M87 in multiple wavelengths. See high resolutions here.
Above: Click here for full subtitles, credit version and high resolution.
The main purpose of this, the researchers said, is to produce and release a set of old data that astronomers will be able to use for years to study M87 * and its jet, to try to gain additional perspective on this. phenomenon and how it occurs.
“Understanding particle acceleration is really essential in our understanding of both EHT image and jets, in all their ‘colors,'” said astrophysicist Sera Markoff of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
“These jets manage to transport the energy released by the black hole on larger scales than the host galaxy, like a huge power cord. Our results will help us calculate the amount of power transported and the effect of black hole jets on its environment. “
The first analysis of the data by the team is interesting. It shows that at the time of the observations of the Horizon Event Telescope in April 2017, the region around it was at its weakest I have ever seen. Unlike making the shadow of the black hole harder to imagine, this made things easier, as it meant that the M87 * was the brightest thing in its immediate, unobtrusive bright environment.
They also found that gamma radiation – which can be produced by interacting with cosmic rays, the origin of which is currently unknown – did not come close to the horizon of black hole events at the time of these observations, but somewhere further.
Exactly where it’s still a bit of a puzzle, but that’s the beauty of this work – it’s something that scientists will be building for a long time, especially as the Horizon Event Telescope continues to work. There is an observation race going on right now, at the time of writing, and that the data will give scientists a lot to analyze.
“With the publication of this data, combined with the resumption of observation and improved EHT, we know that many interesting new results are on the horizon,” said astrophysicist Mislav Baloković of Yale University.
The results were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.