2/2/2024 0 Comments First image of blackhole meme![]() NASA started the week on Monday with some content that much like the event horizon of a black hole does to anything that crosses it, grabs the attention and doesn't let go.įirst up was an animation produced by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab that begins at the sun and pulls back to reveal elements of the solar system and the size of the supermassive black holes. This light-trapping outer boundary is called " the event horizon." Monday: NASA grabs the imagination and doesn't let go This work was published today (March 24) in two papers in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by the EHT collaboration, which involved over 300 researchers from organizations around the world. You can find the papers here and here.Įmail Chelsea Gohd at or follow her on Twitter Follow us on Twitter and on Facebook.This collapsing matter is so dense it creates a region of space so distorted and warped that at its edge not even light is fast enough to escape its gravitational influence. Going forward, the team hopes to continue observing M87, they told, not just in polarization but also "at different wavelengths, to build a more complete picture of the black hole's surroundings and probe magnetic fields in more detail," they added. "We still don't know all the details of how jets are generated, but we know that magnetic fields may play a critical role," Marti-Vidal said. The result is an interesting clue to how black holes feed on gas and grow," Dexter added. Our results indicate that the magnetic fields can push the gas around and resist being stretched. "The main finding is that we not only see the magnetic fields near the black hole as expected, but they also appear to be strong. (Image credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Goddi et al.)īut these observations didn't just reveal magnetic fields on the edge of the black hole in M87, they also show that the gas there is very strongly magnetized. This image reveals the structure of the magnetic field along the jet. This image shows the jet in the M87 galaxy in polarized light, as captured by ALMA. Related: Images: Black holes of the universe The polarized image we see tells us about the structure and strength of these magnetic fields very close to the black hole in M87, where the jet is launched," Dexter said. "Astronomers have long thought that magnetic fields carried by the hot gas near black holes play an important role in letting the gas fall in, and in launching relativistic jets of energetic particles out into the surrounding galaxy. The team's observations and this new view of the object in M87 is deepening scientists' understanding of the structure of magnetic fields just outside of a black hole, as it has remained a mystery how jets larger than the galaxy itself are emitted from the black hole at its heart. ![]() "These polarized receivers work in a way similar to that of the polarized sunglasses that some people use."īy showing the black hole in M87 through polarized light, the team got a better look at the object's event horizon, which is also known as the "point of no return" because it's the point at which no matter can get closer to the black hole without being pulled in. They also were able to better study the interaction with the object's accretion disk, which is a disk of hot gas and other diffuse material that falls in toward a black hole and swirls around it. "The radio telescopes of the EHT have receivers that record the sky signal in polarized light," Ivan Marti-Vidal, also a coordinator of the EHT Polarimetry Working Group and GenT Distinguished Researcher at the Universitat de Valencia in Spain, told. ![]() To capture the black hole, the collaboration used eight telescopes from around the world, combining their power to create a virtual Earth-sized telescope (the EHT).
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