The Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, which released the world's first image of a black hole in 2019, unveiled a new view on Wednesday showing how the object at the center of the M87 galaxy looks in polarized light. EHT Collaboration hide caption
Two years after producing the first-ever image of a black hole, an international team of researchers has released an updated view of the magnetic fields surrounding it — a development they say brings them one step closer to understanding the M87 galaxy's ability to "launch energetic jets from its core."
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New image reveals supermassive black hole's swirling magnetic field - CNN
(CNN) Astronomers have a new, more complete picture of the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy 55 million light-years from Earth -- the first black hole ever to be imaged.
A supermassive black hole on the move | Space | EarthSky
Astronomers have discovered a restless supermassive black hole that’s moving within its galaxy.
This is the first direct image of a black hole , released by scientists in April 2019. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around this black hole, which is 6.5 billion times more massive than our sun. This black hole is located in the center of the galaxy M87, only 55 million light-years from Earth.
Everything in space is moving . But astronomers have wondered if it were possible for supermassive black holes – the light-devouring masses at the centers of galaxies – to move relative to their host galaxies. Until now, the answer was probably . Such movement would be tough for objects as massive as supermassive black holes, which can outweigh our sun by millions of times.
The Most Intimate Portrait Yet of a Black Hole - The New York Times
The Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, an international team of radio astronomers that has been staring down the throat of a giant black hole for years, on Wednesday published what it called the most intimate portrait yet of the forces that give rise to quasars, the luminous fountains of energy that can reach across interstellar and intergalactic space and disrupt the growth of distant galaxies.
The black hole in question is a monster 6.5 billion times as massive as the sun, and lies in the center of an enormous elliptical galaxy, Messier 87, about 55 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. Two years ago, the team photographed it, producing the first-ever image of a black hole; the hitherto invisible entity, a porthole to eternity. It looked like a fuzzy smoke ring, much as Albert Einstein's equations had predicted a century ago.
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This is the most detailed picture of a black hole to date | Engadget
It may have taken ages to capture the first real image of a black hole , but it took just a couple of years for the follow-up. The New York Times reports that Event Horizon Telescope researchers have released the most detailed picture of a black hole to date. The updated snapshot of the Messier 87 galaxy's hole shows it in polarized light for the first time, illustrating how magnetic fields (indicated by the lines you see here) behave at the very edge of the cosmic phenomenon.
A new black hole image reveals the behemoth's magnetic fields | Science News
The Event Horizon Telescope has unveiled the magnetism of the hot, glowing gas around the supermassive black hole at the heart of galaxy M87, researchers report in two studies published online March 24 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters . These magnetic fields are thought to play a crucial role in how the black hole scarfs down matter and launches powerful plasma jets thousands of light-years into space ( SN: 3/29/19 ).
"We've known for decades that jets are in some sense powered by accretion onto supermassive black holes, and that the in-spiraling gas and the outflowing plasma are highly magnetized — but there was a lot of uncertainty in the exact details," says Eileen Meyer, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County not involved in the work. "The magnetic field structure of the plasma near the event horizon [of a black hole] is a completely new piece of information."
New image of black hole released by astronomers | CBC News
A team of international scientists that includes a Canadian researcher has released a more detailed image of a black hole.
The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont., says the new image shows the "crisp swirl" of light around the black hole as it appears in polarized light.
The institute's Avery Broderick says the polarized light allows researchers to learn more about the magnetic fields surrounding the black hole in the M87 galaxy.
Detailed image of a black hole's magnetic field may explain how matter fuels powerful jets |
The team that in 2019 brought you the first image of a black hole is now offering a new twist on that iconic view. The thin lines spiraling toward the central black hole shadow in the image above show emissions with different polarizations—the direction in which light waves vibrate. Light is polarized if it passes through a magnetic field, so the spiraling lines point to the twisting magnetic field lines near the black hole's event horizon.
As the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team describes today in a pair of papers in Astrophysical Journal , the new picture uses the same data as in the original image , produced from a series of observations in 2017 of the supermassive black hole at the core of nearby galaxy M87, using the combined collecting power of eight radio observatories across the world. To extract the polarization information, the data have gone through many months of additional analysis .
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