The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team has released a series of images that provide a detailed view of the supermassive black hole located at the center of the M87 galaxy. The images are the first to capture polarized light around a black hole, allowing scientists to better understand the colossal cosmic object’s behavior and structure.
Polarization is a property of light that causes it to oscillate in a particular direction, similar to the way sunglasses filter sunlight to reduce glare. In the context of black holes, polarized light allows researchers to directly observe the area around the black hole where matter is being sucked in, or ‘accreted’, and where powerful jets of energy are being expelled.
The M87 black hole, which gained fame in 2019 as the first black hole to be directly imaged, is located about 55 million light-years away from Earth in the Virgo galaxy cluster. The black hole is estimated to have a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun.
The newly released images further reveal that a significant amount of light around the M87 black hole is polarized. This discovery suggests that magnetic fields at the black hole’s edge play a critical role in the process that leads to the production of powerful jets of energy and matter.
The EHT team’s findings help to confirm theories about how matter behaves near black holes. The magnetic fields at the edge of the black hole are strong enough to resist the gravitational pull and assist in the accretion process. At the same time, they also help to channel some of the matter into the jets that are expelled far into space.
The EHT team comprises over 300 researchers from various institutions around the world. The EHT is not a single telescope but an array of radio telescopes spread across the globe, effectively creating a virtual telescope the size of Earth.
The EHT team’s latest achievement provides a new level of detail about black holes, enabling scientists to better comprehend these fascinating and enigmatic cosmic phenomena. The results of their research were published in two separate papers in The Astrophysical Journal.
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