Telescopes from around the world have teamed up to make unprecedented images of the M87 * supermassive black hole, as it pulls matter into space at 99% of the speed of light.
This is the same famous black hole that was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope and unveiled in 2019.
That first version was a spectacular success. They needed many years of work and a series of radio telescopes spanning the world, combining their observations to represent a region of space not much larger than the solar system 55 million light-years away.
Now, a team of scientists has added data from more telescopes across various wavelengths of light, each of which reveals different features of the M87 * black hole and the relativistic plasma jet that is firing into space.
“We knew the first direct image of a black hole would be groundbreaking,” said astronomer Kazuhiro Hada of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.
“But to make the most of this remarkable image, we need to know all we can about the behavior of the black hole at that time by observing the entire electromagnetic spectrum.”
There is so much more in a black hole than what we see in the enlarged image we see of the shadow and the halo of M87 * above. The supermassive black hole is active, dropping the material from the hot disk of dust and gas surrounding it, which means that quite complex things can happen.
One of these is the expulsion of relativistic rays that are fired from the poles of the black hole.
Nothing we can detect today can escape a black hole once it exceeds the critical proximity threshold, but not all of the accretion disk material that rotates toward an active black hole inevitably ends up beyond the event horizon. . A small fraction somehow wraps from the inner region of the accretion disk to the poles, where it is thrown into space in the form of jets of ionized plasma, at significant speeds of the speed of light.
Astronomers think that the magnetic field of the black hole plays an important role in this process. The magnetic field lines, according to this theory, act as a synchrotron that accelerates the material before launching it at a tremendous speed.
In the case of M87 *, that is, 99 percent of the speed of light, about the speed that relativistic planes can get, and the beam we can see extends about 5,000 light-years into space. The light it emits covers the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from the lowest to the most energetic, so observing it only in a wavelength band would mean losing some information about the energy of the structure.
Thus, the team added data from telescopes observing the jets at various wavelengths, including the Hubble Space Telescope for optical light; the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Swift X-ray Telescope; the NuSTAR high-energy X-ray space telescope; the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory for Ultraviolet and Optical; and HESS, MAGIC, VERITAS and the Fermi-Large Area telescope for gamma radiation.
M87 in multiple wavelengths. See the high resolutions here.
At the top: Click here for the full version of subtitles, credits and high resolution.
The researchers said the main purpose of this is to produce and release a set of inherited data that astronomers will be able to use for years to study M87 * and its reactor, to try to learn more about this phenomenon and how it occurs.
“Understanding particle acceleration is really critical to understanding both the EHT image and jets, in all their‘ colors, ’” said astrophysicist Sera Markoff of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
“These jets manage to transport the energy released by the black hole to larger scales than the host galaxy, like a huge power cord. Our results will help us calculate the amount of power transported and the effect the jets have. of the black hole in its surroundings. “
The team’s first analysis of their data is interesting. It shows that, at the time of the observations of the Event Horizon Telescope, in April 2017, the surrounding region was the weakest we have ever seen. As opposed to making the shadow of the black hole harder to get, this made things easier, as it meant that M87 * was the brightest in its immediate vicinity, while still observing the dazzle.
They also found that gamma radiation, which can be produced by interacting with cosmic rays, the origin of which is currently unknown, did not come close to the horizon of black hole events at the time of these. observations, but somewhere further away.
Precisely where there is still a puzzle, but that is the beauty of this work: it is something that scientists will be building for a long time, especially when the Event Horizon Telescope continues to work. He is currently making an observation, at the time of writing, and this data will give a lot of reflection to scientists.
“With the release of this data, combined with the resumption of observation and an improvement in EHT, we know that there are many exciting new results on the horizon,” said astrophysicist Mislav Baloković of the University of Yale.
The results have been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.