Scientists have tracked a 3,000 light-year-long cosmic jet shooting out from Earth. First ever black hole photographed A new study published this week reveals that it likely reached the source with the help of “significantly enhanced coverage” from the global Event Horizon Telescope.
The findings, published Wednesday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, could help pinpoint where and how black holes launch their massive cosmic jets that travel at near the speed of light.
M87 is a supermassive black hole located in the Messier 87 galaxy, about 55 light-years from Earth, and is 6.5 billion times larger than the Sun.
of first image M87 data was collected by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2017 and made available to the public in 2019.
Discover the oldest black hole in the universe and challenge the mysteries of the universe
Scientists have tracked a 3,000-light-year-long cosmic jet streaming from the first black hole ever imaged to its source, with the help of “significantly enhanced viewing coverage” from the global Event Horizon telescope, according to a new study published this week. (Hubble Telescope/NASA)
NASA’s Dr. Paddy Boyd explained in a video about the black hole’s discovery that not only is it supermassive, but it’s also “active.” “Only a small percentage is active at any given time. Does it turn on or off? That’s the idea… We know that when you fire a jet, there’s a very high magnetic field. So this image is observational evidence that what we’ve been seeing for a while is actually being fired by a jet connected to the supermassive black hole at the center of M87.”
According to Scientific American and Space.com, M87 sucks in surrounding gas and dust and spits out a powerful jet of charged particles from its poles, forming a jet stream.
‘Smoking gun evidence’: ‘monster’ black hole activity discovered surprised scientists
“This study represents an early step toward linking theoretical ideas about jet launches with direct observations,” Saurabh, team leader at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, said in a statement, according to the news agency. space dot com.
The first ever image of the M87 black hole taken by the Event Horizon telescope and released in 2019. (National Science Foundation, via Getty Images)
He added: “Determining where the jet originates from and how it connects to the black hole’s shadow adds an important piece to the puzzle and leads to a deeper understanding of how the central engine operates.”
The Event Horizon Telescope includes a worldwide network of eight radio astronomical observatories that can detect radio waves from celestial objects such as galaxies and black holes that come together to create an Earth-sized telescope.
Elliptical galaxy M87 is home to trillions of stars, a supermassive black hole, and about 15,000 globular clusters. (NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); Acknowledgments: P. Cote (Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics) and E. Baltz (Stanford University))
According to the National Science Foundation, the event horizon refers to the boundary of a black hole beyond which light cannot escape.
Click here to download the FOX News app
The findings were obtained after studying data from the 2021 Event Horizon Telescope, but the study’s authors added, “Although this result is robust under the assumptions and tests performed, future EHT observations with higher sensitivity and improved mid-baseline coverage with additional stations and expanded frequency ranges will be required for final confirmation and more precise constraints.”
