Madrid. New observations of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy M87 have revealed the origins of its powerful jet. Images of it and their birth together for the first time were captured.
Furthermore, observations of this SMBH revealed that the black hole’s ring is much larger than scientists believed. The findings were published in Nature.
The Global mm-VLBI Array (GMVA) brought together radio telescopes from around the world to produce these new results, including the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Observatory (GBO), Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and Green Bank Telescope (GBT).
The SMBH at the center of the galaxy M87 is the most recognizable in the universe. It was the first black hole captured in an image, created by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) and made public in 2019. The image of its dark, dense core framed by a bright amorphous ring made international headlines. .
“M87 has been observed for many decades, and 100 years ago we knew the jet was there, but we couldn’t place it in context,” Ru-Sen Lu, an astronomer at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and leader of the Max Planck Institute, said in a statement. of the Research Group of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and lead author of the new paper. “With the aforementioned instruments we look at a lower frequency, so we see more detail, and now we know there’s still more.”
Eduardo Ros, astronomer and scientific coordinator for Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, added: “We’ve seen the ring before, but now we’re looking at the jet, which puts it in context, and it’s bigger than we thought. Thought of as a fire-breathing monster, before we could see the dragon and the fire, but now we observe that being breathing fire”.
Using many different telescopes and instruments gave the team a more complete view of the structure of the supermassive black hole and its jet than was previously possible with EHT, requiring all telescopes to paint a complete picture. While VLBA provided a complete view of the jet and today, ALMA enabled scientists to resolve M87’s bright radio nucleus and create a sharp image. The sensitivity of the GBT’s 100-meter collecting surface made it possible for astronomers to resolve both large- and small-scale parts of the ring and see the finer details.
“The original EHT image revealed only a part of the accretion disk surrounding the center of the black hole. By changing the observation wavelengths from 1.3 millimeters to 3.5 millimeters, we can see more of the accretion disk, and now the jet, at the same time. This revealed that the ring around the hole is 50 per cent larger than we thought,” explained Toney Minter, GMVA coordinator for GBT.
It is now possible to confirm the origin of the jet: it was born from the energy created by the magnetic fields surrounding the rotating core of the black hole and the winds that rise from the accretion disk of the hole.
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