![]() ![]() The object in the photograph released on Thursday is a supermassive black hole found at the centre of another galaxy - Messier 87 - 55 million light years (520,340,176,000,000,000,000km) away. ![]() Usually found at the centres of galaxies, supermassive black holes can be billions of times as massive as our sun. It's not yet clear how supermassive black holes are formed, but the leading theory is they're the result of several smaller black holes joining together. It's estimated there could be as many as 1 billion of these types of black holes in our galaxy, the Milky Way, but they're hard to spot. Most are created when stars at least three times bigger than our sun die - if there's enough mass left over after it's exploded, the sheer strength of the gravity pulls everything together so tightly, Einstein's equations break down. ![]() They're the densest things in the universe. The idea of an object whose gravity is so strong not even light can escape was first formulated in the 18th century, but it wasn't until the 1910s that scientists began to understand how they could exist.ĭespite their name, black holes aren't empty space - quite the opposite. It took eight telescopes, 200 astronomers and two years of number-crunching to produce the historic image, which looks exactly as astronomers predicted it would, thanks to theories developed by Albert Einstein a century ago.īut what is a black hole? And why did astronomers choose to look at this one in particular? “To study this directly, we need to observe the origin of the jet as close as possible to the black hole,” Ru-Sen Lu, lead author of the study and researcher at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, tells the Guardian.Īlan Marscher, a co-author and astrophysicist at Boston University, theorizes to Inverse’s Doris Elín Urrutia that a magnetic field created by the material swirling around the black hole could be driving the jets.īut how exactly the jets are formed in the first place is “a big question, and that’s what we’re trying to answer,” he tells the publication.Scientists on Thursday unveiled the first-ever photo of a black hole. As a result, the image could help researchers better understand why this material is being spewed into space. ![]() Observing in longer wavelengths also allowed the telescopes to capture a more zoomed-out view, containing both the ring and the jet. The new view of the object used light with a longer wavelength of 3.5 millimeters, which revealed more plasma in the ring-its diameter is around 50 percent larger in the new image than in the original. Astronomers captured the 2017 image in a similar way, but those telescopes detected light with a wavelength of 1.3 millimeters, resulting in a close-up look at the ring of material just outside the black hole. To create the new image, researchers used radio observations from 16 telescopes around the world, acting in tandem as an Earth-sized observatory. And it’s no stranger to the lens-the famous first image of a supermassive black hole, taken in 2017, shows the same distant behemoth. The pictured black hole lies at the center of a galaxy called Messier 87, located 54 million light years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. The new image “helps to better understand the complicated physics around black holes, how jets are launched and accelerated and how matter inflow into the black hole and matter outflow are related,” Thomas Krichbaum, a co-author of the study and an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, tells Reuters’ Will Dunham. The researchers hope the findings, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, can help answer this and other questions about these dark abysses in space. But they can also shoot out jets of matter at nearly light speed, though scientists don’t know why this happens, according to the Guardian’s Hannah Devlin. “Now we can start to address questions such as how matter is captured by a black hole, and how it sometimes manages to escape,” Kazunori Akiyama, a co-author of the study and an astrophysicist at MIT, says in a statement.īlack holes, which have a tremendously strong gravitational pull, suck in anything in their vicinity, including light. “This is an amazing result,” Sasha Tchekhovskoy, an astrophysicist who studies black holes at Northwestern University and did not contribute to the research, tells Sky & Telescope’s Camille M. Scientists have known that black holes emanate jets, but this image is the first to show the jet’s base connecting to the black hole’s accretion disk, or the collection of matter that releases radiation as it’s sucked inside the void. The jet is longer than the galaxy that contains it, stretching for 5,000 light-years. In a stunning new image, astronomers have captured a black hole at the center of a distant galaxy expelling a high-energy jet of matter out into the cosmos. ![]()
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