Astronomers get the first image of a black hole with a beating plasma stream

Miscellaneous / by admin / April 27, 2023

A powerful burst of energy that goes far beyond the galaxy.

Recently, the first and most famous photo of a supermassive black hole in the galaxy M 87 improved with the help of artificial intelligence. It turned out a beautiful picture, but without dynamics. Now the scientists could get a new image, which captured the exit of a relativistic jet or jet - a plasma stream from the center of an object.

Image: R.-S. Lu (SHAO), E. Ros (MPIfR), S. Dagnello (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

M 87 or Messier 87 is a supergiant elliptical galaxy, the largest in the constellation Virgo. At its center is a supermassive black hole, which makes the core active.

The new image shows for the first time exactly how the base of an astrophysical jet moving at speed approaching the speed of light, combines with matter around a supermassive black hole and goes far beyond galaxies. Astronomers call this process accretion.

A black hole with a plasma flow as imagined by an artist. Image: S. Dagnello (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

In previous images of M 87, astronomers have been able to capture the plasma flow and the supermassive black hole itself, but only separately, not together.

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This new image completes the picture by showing the area around the black hole and the jet at the same time.

Jae-young Kim

Member of a research team from the National Kyungpuk University in South Korea and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.

Jet M 87. An old image from the Hubble telescope. Image: NASA

The new image was created using data from 2018 obtained from several radio telescopes operating as a single network. Scientists hope that the data obtained will help in the study of such unexplored matter.

We know that jets are ejected from the region surrounding black holes, but we still do not fully understand how this actually happens. To study this directly, we need to observe the source of the jet as close as possible to the black hole.

Ru-Sen Lu

Member of the research team of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory.