Telescopes from around the world teamed up to take unprecedented photos of the supermassive black hole M87 *, as it exploded matter at 99 percent the speed of light in space.
This is the same famous black hole that was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope and unveiled in 2019.
The first version was a brilliant achievement. It took many years of work and a variety of radio telescopes that stretched across the globe, and their observations combined to image a space of 55 million light-years away that is not much larger than the solar system.
Now a team of scientists has added data from multiple telescopes over different wavelengths of light, each revealing different properties of the black hole M87 * and the relativistic plasma beam that explodes in space.
“We knew the first direct image of a black hole would be pioneering work,” said astronomer Kazuhiro Hada of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.
“But to make the most of this remarkable image, we need to know everything we can about the black hole’s behavior at that time, by observing the entire electromagnetic spectrum.”
There’s much more to a black hole than we see in the zoomed – in image we see of M87 *’s shadow and halo above. The supermassive black hole is active and sneaks material away from the hot dust and gas around it, which means a lot of complicated things can happen.
One of these is the ejection of relativistic jets launched from the poles of the black hole.
Nothing we can currently detect can escape a black hole once it has reached the critical threshold, but not all of the material in the growth disk that rotates in an active black hole necessarily ends up outside the event horizon. A small fraction of it is somehow transported from the inner region of the growth disk to the poles, where it is blown into space in the form of rays of ionized plasma, with a significant percentage of the speed of light.
Astronomers think that the magnetic field of the black hole plays a role in this process. According to this theory, the magnetic field lines act as a synchrotron that accelerates material before it starts at a tremendous speed.
In the case of M87 * it is 99 percent of the speed of light – as fast as relativistic rays can get – and the ray we can see extends about 5,000 light-years into space. The light it emits extends across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from the least to the most energetic, so if you were to observe it in only one wavelength band, you would be missing out on the energy of the structure.
The team therefore added data from telescopes that observe the rays at different wavelengths, including the Hubble Space Telescope for optical light; the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Swift X-Ray Telescope; the NuSTAR space telescope for high-energy X-rays; the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory for ultraviolet and optical; and HESS, MAGIC, VERITAS and the Fermi-Large Area Telescope for gamma radiation.
M87 in various wavelengths. See high reviews here.
Above: Click here for full caption, credit and high version.
The primary purpose of this, according to the researchers, is to compile and release a legacy dataset that astronomers could use for years to study M87 * and its jets, to gain further insight into this phenomenon and how it occurs.
“The understanding of particle acceleration is very important for our understanding of the EHT image as well as the rays, in all their ‘colors’,” said astrophysicist Sera Markoff of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
“These radiators succeed in exporting energy released through the black hole to scales larger than the host system, such as a large power cord. Our results will help us calculate the amount of power carried, and the effect that has the rays of the black hole on its surroundings. “
The team’s first analysis of their data is interesting. It showed that the region around it was the darkest we had ever seen during the Event Horizon Telescope observations in April 2017. Other than making the shadow of the black hole harder to picture, it made things easier because it meant that M87 * was the brightest thing in its immediate vicinity, without blinding.
They also found that gamma radiation – which can be produced by interacting with cosmic rays, the origin of which is currently unknown – was not near the events of the black hole at the time of the observation, but somewhere further out.
Exactly true is still a bit of a mystery, but that’s the beauty of this work – it’s something scientists will continue to build on for a long time, especially if the Event Horizon Telescope is still working. At the time of writing, it is currently being observed and that the scientists will give scientists a lot.
“With the release of these data, combined with the resumption of observation and an improved EHT, we know that many new exciting results are at hand,” said Yale University astrophysicist Mislav Baloković.
The results were published in 2008 The astrophysical journal letters.