SHANGHAI, April 28 (Xinhua) — An international team of researchers has captured, for the first time, an image that includes the shadow of a black hole at the heart of the galaxy “M87” and the powerful jets it emitted.
The black hole of the galaxy “M87” has a mass of 6.5 billion times that of the Sun and is 55 million light-years away from Earth.
In April 2019, an image of a “donut”-like structure featuring a dark central region and a bright ring made international headlines as the first-ever image of a black hole.
A black hole can swallow matter in its vicinity and eject powerful particles out of the galaxy that harbors the black hole at the center. Astronomers are trying to observe the origin of the jet as accurately as possible, in order to better understand how the energetic jets are created.
The latest published image of the M87 black hole was obtained using the VLBI Global Millimeter Array (GMVA), the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), and the Greenland Telescope (GLT), all of which formed a network of radio telescopes around the world. The astronomers used light captured at different locations to build up an image with a resolution similar to that of a hypothetical Earth-sized telescope.
Lu Ruo Sen of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, who is the lead author of the research paper published in the latest issue of the journal “Nature”, said that astronomers once observed the black hole and the powerful jet in separate images, and that the new image captures the black hole and the jet in one image along new wave.
ALMA and GLT improved the accuracy and sensitivity of the observations and helped achieve imaging of the ring around the black hole “M87” with a wavelength of 3.5 millimeters.
At a wavelength of 3.5 millimeters, Lu said, researchers can see how the jet is being released from the emission ring around the central supermassive black hole.
He added that the observations revealed more details about the “M87” black hole.
For his part, Shen Zhiqiang, director of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, said that observations of “M87” will continue to reveal how the black hole releases powerful jets and other complex processes near it.
