The new Black Hole image reveals its “most mysterious” feature

Astronomers published the most detailed image of a black hole to date, which revealed its “most mysterious” feature: the bright rays of energy that are fired for thousands of light years.

The new collaboration image of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) used polarized light (filtering it, like polarized sunglasses) to show the area around the black hole. And that, in turn, provided the sharpest look so far of these jets of energy.

“Most of the material on the edge of a black hole is falling,” the collaboration said in a press release. “However, some of the surrounding particles escape moments before they are captured and are ejected into space in the form of jets.”

This leads to rays of energy and matter extending about 5,000 light-years from the center, as shown in the new image, the first detailed view of the region located just outside the black hole:

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

“Recently published polarized images are key to understanding how the magnetic field allows the black hole to‘ eat ’matter and launch powerful jets,” Andrew Chael, a NASA Hubble member at the Center for Theoretical Sciences, said in an EHT statement of Princeton. press release.

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

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

The next step can be more than just a picture.

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