A historic achievement in astronomy has been achieved by an international team of scientists, who have captured the first never-before-seen image of a black hole supermassive and its jet of matter.
The photograph, obtained by the telescopes of the Global Millimeter VLBI Array, the Greenland Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array observatory, shows how powerful jets or jets of particles are formed from the material that the black hole of the Earth feeds on. galaxy Messier 87 (M87).
The discovery, in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC) has participated, reveals the connection between the accretion flow near the central supermassive black hole and the origin of the jet, which is considered a great advance in understanding of the physical processes that act near the black hole.
“Previously, we had seen both the black hole and the jet in separate images, but now we have taken a panoramic image of both,” said Ru-Sen Lu, a researcher at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory.
The Messier 87 galaxy is located approximately 55 million light-years from Earth and is an elliptical galaxy.
In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) obtained the first image of the supermassive black hole at its core, which is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun.
M87 presents a jet that emerges from its central regions and extends well beyond the size of the galaxy that hosts it.
Although black holes show such an intense gravitational field that not even light can escape from them, there are mechanisms through which they release part of the material that is trapped in their vicinity, forming an accretion disk, like high-speed jets.
Theoretical models suggest that surrounding material falls into the black hole in a process known as accretion, but until now it has not been directly observed.
In summary, the unprecedented image of a supermassive black hole and its jet of matter obtained by a team of international scientists reveals a connection between the accretion flow near the central supermassive black hole and the origin of the jet.
This finding provides a more complete picture of the physical processes that act near the black hole and represents a great advance in the understanding of these phenomena.
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