Discovery of jets with black holes

Discovery of jets with black holes

We have been hearing about the mighty forces of the universe. The desire to see whom has always been in the mind. Through technological development it is now possible to see them. Scientists have shown such a picture, about which we could only imagine. This picture is of a jet with a black hole. This is the first time we are seeing a picture of a jet with a black hole. This picture is unbelievable, but it is a mirror of truth. This image is of the black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 with jets emanating from it. To confirm this, astronomers used telescopes around the world.

New picture released last week

At the center of the distant galaxy Messier 87 is a supermassive black hole. In which the powerful jet is at its center. This galaxy is 55 million light-years away from us. The picture of this black hole was first taken by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) in 2019. An international group of astronomers released the new picture on Wednesday, April 26, 2023. The researchers published the same day in Nature paper.

The discovery made possible by these telescopes

Global MM-VLBI Array (GMVA), Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and Greenland Telescope (GLT). The European Southern Observatory (ESO) ALMA was collectively involved in taking this picture.

That’s what’s called the relativistic jet — said lead author Ru-Sen Lu of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China — who captured the two in a single picture. Scientists have known for a long time that black holes can emit these huge jets. But how they form is still not well understood. The ionized matter within the jet moves at close to the speed of light. We know that jets shoot out from the region around the black hole. But we still don’t fully understand how exactly this happens. To study it directly we need to observe the origin of the jet as close as possible to the black hole. Thanks to ALMA’s location and sensitivity, we can reveal black hole shadows and look deep into the jet’s emission at the same time.

We tend to think of black holes as powerful objects that suck up material that can never escape, said co-author Jae-Young Kim of Kyungpook National University in South Korea and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany. Even light cannot escape from a black hole. This is basically true, but black holes can also have giant rings of matter – called accretion disks – that spin around them. The new images show the base of the jet associated with the ring surrounding the black hole.

Many secrets will open with the future of Messier 87 black hole

The researchers plan to use a similar network of telescopes to observe black holes. This should help astronomers better understand how the powerful jets are generated. “We plan to observe the region around the black hole at the center of M87 at different radio wavelengths to further study the emission of the jet,” said Eduardo Ros of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. The coming years will be exciting, as we will be able to learn more about what happens near one of the most mysterious regions in the universe

Source: Earth Sky.

Lu(SHAO)/E.Ros(MPIFR)/S. Dagnello (NRAO/AUI/NSF)/ ESO.