The brand new image of supermassive black hole M87* is the most detailed yet.
In 2017, researchers used a virtual telescope the size of
our planet to image the shadow of a supermassive black hole for the first time.
The image was of M87*, the black hole at the center of galaxy Messier 87, and
was the first image of the shadow of the event horizon and bright accretion
disk around a black hole ever taken. Now the team has released a new image of
M87* from observations conducted a year later that show the shadow is not only
a persistent feature, as predicted, but that the brightness of the ring has
changed.
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team used eight
independent imaging and modeling techniques to analyze the data from the April
2018 observations and found the brightness peak of the orange disk has shifted
by about 30 degrees counterclockwise – now at the 5 o'clock position, which can
be seen in the image above on the right – compared to that seen in 2017, while
the size of the ring and the shadow are unchanged, as general relativity
predicted.
"Confirmation of the ring in a completely new data set
is a huge milestone for our collaboration and a strong indication that we are
looking at a black hole shadow and the material orbiting around it," Dr
Keiichi Asada of the Academia Sinica Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics
in Taiwan said in a statement.
M87* weighs 6.5 billion times the mass of our Sun and is
located 53.5 million light-years away. The shift in the brightness spot seen in
the new observations was predicted, the idea being that the emission from the
turbulent, messy accretion disk around the supermassive black hole – full of
material that couldn't escape the black hole's gravitational pull – will cause
the brightest part to wobble. The wobble can be used to test our theories about
the behavior of the magnetic field and plasma around the black hole.
The EHT images of these incredible objects are possible
thanks to a fantastic property of light. Observations from radio telescopes
that are a certain distance apart can be combined in a way that is equivalent
to a telescope the size of their distance. By combining radio telescopes around
the world, the initial 2017 EHT was the size of our planet. For the 2018
observations, new telescopes in Greenland and Mexico had been added, and even
more have been added since.
"The inclusion of the Greenland Telescope in our array
filled critical gaps in our earth-sized telescope," Rohan Dahale, a PhD
candidate at the Instituto de AstrofÃsica de AndalucÃa. "The 2021, 2022,
and the forthcoming 2024 observations witness improvements to the array,
fuelling our enthusiasm to push the frontiers of black hole astrophysics."
In 2022 we got the first image of our own galaxy's
supermasive black hole, Sagitarrius A*, and in 2023 the first direct image of a
black hole launching its jets, as well as an AI-sharpened M87* glow up. With
every new image or details revealed, and more telescopes adding to the size and
capabilities of the EHT, the question is: what are we zooming in on next?