The black hole shoots a beam of matter into space – researchers succeed in imaging this

Many supermassive black holes spew matter out into space. Now, for the first time, researchers have succeeded in recording the region around the black hole and the jets of matter at the same time.

Bonn Black holes are mysterious celestial bodies. Her amazing attractiveness pulls away all who approach her. Matter orbiting an active black hole on the so-called accretion disk heats up, glows, and is gradually swallowed up by the monstrous celestial body. Some black holes also throw out into space what is called a jet – a stream of matter moving almost at the speed of light.

How black holes create these jets, which extend far beyond their galaxy, remains a mystery. Ru-Sen Lu of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China says in one communication. But we still don’t fully understand how this actually happens. For a direct study, we need to observe the origin of the jet as close to the black hole as possible.”

The M87* black hole spews a stream of matter into space

The new recording could help researchers track down this phenomenon. A research group used the Global Millimeter VLBI Array (GMVA) — a group of radio telescopes that combine to form a telescope spanning Earth — to image the M87* black hole and its jet. M87* is about 55 million light-years from Earth and 6.5 billion times the mass of our Sun. Like most supermassive black holes, it is located at the center of the galaxy. M87* may be one of the most famous black holes, as it is the sample from which the first image of a black hole was published in 2019.

The 2019 image shows the region around the black hole, including its shadow on the accretion disk. The new image shows even more: not only can the region around the black hole be seen, but also the jet M87* is emitting from. “This new image completes the picture by showing the region around the black hole and the jet at the same time,” says Jae-Yong Kim of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn.

Scientists study black holes in a new way

“The large and thick ring that we see now can be explained by gas falling into the black hole,” Lu explains. “The observed radiation allows for a better understanding of the physical processes in the immediate vicinity of the black hole and the interaction between accretion and jet generation,” he adds. The method used to capture the image isn’t new: Several large radio telescopes around the world have been linked together using Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) to form a large Earth-spanning telescope. The first image of the black hole was also taken with a similar technique.

“Through the greatly improved imaging capabilities of GMVA, we are gaining new insights into the physical processes involved in generating jets,” says Thomas Krichbaum of MPIfR. communication. You can see the jet emerging from the emission ring around the black hole. The search was done in the journal nature published.

Only recently did researchers A black hole with more than 30 billion solar masses as well as that The oldest known black hole Discover. (unpaid bill)