Sometimes the pressures get so great around the black hole that it can throw out material in a wind before it gets to the event horizon – and the energy that it expels affects the galaxy as a whole. "A black hole collects matter and grows by eating that matter up," says Becky Smethurst, an astronomer at Oxford University. The implications of this image go beyond testing general relativity, though. Today, he's one of the leaders of the theoretical side of the EHT - and says that the image is an amazing proof that Einstein was right. In 2000, astronomer Dimitrios Psaltis of the University of Arizona and his team calculated how to see the event horizon of a black hole. The theory of black holes, including the nature of real astronomical black holes, was developed by a large number of researchers over the past century. The M87 event horizon shape is precisely in agreement with the predictions of general relativity, including an estimate of how rapidly the black hole is rotating. The asymmetrical shape of the matter shows both the way plasma swirls around the event horizon, and also how the gravitational distortion of spacetime affects the path of the light emitted by the material. The group was also able to calculate the polarization of the light emitted from the different parts of the structures visible in the images they created and to map the magnetic fields in the jets.In a very real sense, the gravitational influence of a black hole is the way we can see it, and that's precisely what the EHT image reveals. The resolution of the images was high enough that two components of the core were visible. Both show brightness at the southern end of one jet, which the researchers believe is a radio core. Study of the quasar has shown it to be optically violent-and it is also a blazar a type of quasar that is oriented such that its jets point nearly directly toward the Earth.īy combining data from multiple telescopes, the research team was able to create two images. Doing the same for the NRAO 530 quasar proved more challenging due its greater distance-approximately 7.5 billion light years away. It was initially used to assist in calibration efforts involved in imaging Sgr A*. Such material, which is converted to plasma, moves past the black hole at a very high rate of speed, which is why they are called jets.ĭata for this new effort was obtained by the EHT telescope array going back to 2017. In addition to the light generated by material as it falls into a black hole, other light is emitted by material that is pulled toward the black hole but doesn't cross the event horizon. In this new study, the astronomers and astrophysicists on the team studied data supplied by many other researchers manning telescopes around the world that play an active role in the EHT project-the same project responsible for creating the first images of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. And while black holes do not emit light, the material they pull toward them does as it becomes heated, leading to the brightness typically associated with quasars. Quasars are types of active galactic nuclei that are believed to be powered by black holes, generally of the supermassive type.
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