A slice of pure nothingness in a distant galaxy has recently become the center of attention for radio astronomers. That would be a giant black hole, with the gravitational pull of 6.5 billion suns, spewing out high-energy particles from the center of the galaxy Messier 87, which is about 50 million light-years from Earth.
In 2019, astronomers operating a network of radio telescopes known as the Event Horizon Telescope stunned the world by creating a radio map of the entity — the first-ever image of a black hole. It showed a dim donut of energy, the glowing radiance produced by doomed matter encircling the dark door to eternity.
Last month, a subset of the same team, using artificial intelligence to analyze the original data, generated a sharper image that showed a thinner doom ring around an even blacker center.
Now, a third group of astronomers has used another worldwide web of observatories — including the Global Millimeter VLBI Array, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, and the Greenland Telescope — to capture a zoomed-out view of the black hole. Their image shows for the first time the base of the well-studied jet of energy and particles rising from the center of the M87 galaxy and hurtling through interstellar space. The image, created by a large international team led by Ru-Sen Lu at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China, was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
By observing the subject at slightly longer radio wavelengths, the team was able to visualize the cooler outer regions of the black hole’s fiery accretion disk, from which the jet appears to be emanating.
“We know that jets are ejected from the region around black holes,” said Dr. Lu in a statement from the European Southern Observatory. “But we still don’t fully understand how this actually happens. To study this directly, we need to observe the origin of the jet as close as possible to the black hole.”
Meanwhile, the Event Horizon Telescope team is gathering resources for more observations, aiming to create a black hole movie.
Kazunori Akiyama, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Haystack Observatory and a member of the Event Horizon project and an author of the new image, said, “I’m very excited to see this result because now we have a new tool to record what happens around the famous black hole of the EHT We can film how the matter falls into a black hole and eventually manages to escape.”