A new image of a supermassive black hole reveals the violent phenomena around it
It was taken using 16 telescopes in different locations on Earth (Reuters)
Scientists have revealed a new image of a black hole, which is the first to show the violent events that take place around one of the most important cosmic phenomena, as it shows the massive emanation of high-energy particles into space .
Scientists obtained the new image, one of the first to capture black holes, using 16 telescopes at different locations on Earth that together formed a planet-sized observing dish. The photographed supermassive black hole is located at the center of a relatively nearby galaxy, Messier 87, or M87, approximately 54 million light-years from Earth .
The same black hole, which has a mass of 6.5 billion and similar to the mass of the sun, appeared in the first image ever taken of this cosmic phenomenon in 2019. And one was taken of another black hole last year.
Both images show only the black hole's darkness and a ring of bright material surrounding it. The new image, which came from observations made using many radio telescopes around the world, shows light emitted at a longer wavelength, expanding what can be seen.
Black holes are difficult to spot by their very nature, as they are an entity with such great pull that no matter or even light can escape by simply falling into their gravitational pull. Supermassive black holes reside in the centers of most galaxies , and some not only devour any surrounding matter, but also shoot huge, fiery jets of high-energy particles far into space.
The new image shows how the base of these jets connects with matter orbiting the black hole in a ring-like formation.
"The image demonstrates for the first time the connection between the flow (of material drawn in) near the supermassive black hole, and the source of the eruption," said astrophysicist Ru Sen Lu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, who is the principal investigator on the study published in the journal Nature. .
Study co-author astrophysicist Thomas Kretschbaum, from the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Germany, said: "This helps better understand the complex physics of black holes, how jets are launched and accelerated, and how matter flowing into the black hole is related to that emanating from it." ".
"This is what astronomers and astrophysicists have been waiting to see for more than half a century... It's the dawn of an exciting new era," Kazunori Akiyama, another co-author of the study, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Haystack Observatory, described it.
The three scientists are members of the Event Horizon Telescope project, an international collaboration that began in 2012, with the aim of observing the environment directly surrounding black holes.
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