They decided to see if they could improve upon that initial view. That process was a good start at visualizing the black hole, but astronomers couldn’t glean much information about it from the blurry result. To generate the 2019 image, astronomers used a “generic” machine-learning system to make sense of Event Horizon Telescope data, as Meghan Bartels writes for Scientific American. When astronomers combined the observations from these different sites, they essentially created a powerful, Earth-sized super telescope. The colossal black hole is massive-with roughly 6.5 billion times more mass than the sun-and has a powerful gravitational pull that nothing can escape.Īstronomers have been studying the M87 black hole for several years using the Event Horizon Telescope, a collaborative initiative that brings together data from several ground-based radio observatories located around the world. The black hole in question is situated roughly 54 million light-years away from Earth, at the center of the Messier 87, or M87, galaxy. Researchers published the new image Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Now, thanks to help from machine-learning technology, they’ve released an updated version of that image that’s much crisper-and, potentially, more useful for unraveling the mysteries of these unusual celestial objects. “The coming years will be exciting, as we will be able to learn more about what happens near one of the most mysterious regions in the Universe.In 2019, astronomers released the first-ever photo of a black hole: a fuzzy, reddish-orange ring set against a black backdrop. “We plan to observe the region around the black hole at the centre of M87 at different radio wavelengths to further study the emission of the jet,” said study coauthor Eduardo Ros, scientific coordinator of the department for very long baseline interferometry at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, in a statement.
More observations from global telescope networks could help unravel other secrets about black holes. But if heated materials in the form of plasma surround the black hole and emit light, the event horizon could be visible. In the theory, Einstein predicted that dense, compact regions of space would have such intense gravity that nothing could escape them. The visual confirmation of black holes also acts as confirmation of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Solving the mystery of the most powerful objects in the universe It is so distant that light from it has travelled for about 13 billion years to reach us: we see it as it was when the Universe was only about 780 million years old. To date (early 2021), this is the most distant quasar with radio jets ever found and it was studied with the help of ESO's Very Large Telescope. This artist's impression shows how the distant quasar P172+18 and its radio jets may have looked.
“At this wavelength, we can see how the jet emerges from the ring of emission around the central supermassive black hole,” said study coauthor Thomas Krichbaum, a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, in a statement. The new image captured radio light emitted at a longer wavelength than the 2019 image. The light creates the ring structure seen glowing around the black hole’s shadow, or the darkness at the center. “This new image completes the picture by showing the region around the black hole and the jet at the same time,” said study coauthor Jae-Young Kim, assistant professor at Kyungpook National University in South Korea, in a statement.Īs matter orbits around the black hole, it heats up and releases radiation in wavelengths of light. Previous observations have shown the jet and black hole separately, including the first direct image of a black hole, released in 2019. In the new image, the connection between the base of the jet and the matter swirling around the supermassive black hole can be seen. Messy eating habits might reveal elusive black hole
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