New Black Hole Image Reveals Its ‘Most Mysterious’ Feature

Astronomers have released the most detailed image of a black hole to date, one that revealed its “most mysterious” feature: the bright rays of energy that shoot out for thousands of light years.

The new image from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration used polarized light – which filtered it, much like polarized sunglasses – to reveal the area around the black hole. And that, in turn, provided the keenest look to date at those beams of energy.

“Most of the matter close to the edge of a black hole falls into it,” the collaboration said in a press release. “However, some surrounding particles escape briefly before being captured and are blown far into space in the form of jets.”

That leads to rays of energy and matter extending some 5,000 light-years from the center, as shown in the new image, the first-ever detailed look at the area just outside the black hole:

Janna Levin, an astrophysicist and professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University, who is not part of the EHT team, told The New York Times that the jets in the new image are essentially “ a deadly, powerful, astronomical jet gun that extends for thousands of light years. ”

“The newly published polarized images are essential for understanding how the magnetic field allows the black hole to ‘eat’ matter and launch powerful jets,” said EHT collaborator Andrew Chael, a NASA Hubble Fellow at the Princeton Center for Theoretic. Science, in a press release.

Launched in 2009, the EHT collaboration is a multinational effort involving some 300 scientists who use a network of radio telescopes around the world to study black holes. Two years ago, the collaboration released the very first image of a black hole, a fuzzy ring that captured the public imagination.

The polarized new image provides an even clearer view of the object at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 or M87, about 55 million light-years away and in the constellation Virgo, as seen from Earth:

The next step can be more than just an image.

“Even now, we are designing a next-generation EHT that will allow us to make the first black hole films,” said Sheperd Doeleman, founder and director of the EHT collaboration, in a press release. “Stay tuned for true black hole cinema.”