A Fresh View of an Increasingly Familiar Black Hole

[Zorro]

Radio astronomers have captured a wide-angle image of one of the most violent locales in the cosmos.

A patch of pure nothing in a faraway galaxy has lately become the gravitational center of attention for radio astronomers. That would be a giant black hole, with the gravity of 6.5 billion suns, that spits high-energy particles from the center of the galaxy Messier 87, which lies some 50 million light-years from Earth.

In 2019, astronomers operating a network of radio telescopes known as the Event Horizon Telescope dazzled the world by producing a radio map of the entity — the first-ever image of a black hole. It showed a fuzzy doughnut of energy, the glowing radiation produced by doomed matter circling the dark door to eternity.

Last month a subset of the same team, using artificial intelligence to analyze the original data, generated a sharper image that showed a thinner doughnut of doom surrounding an even blacker center.

Now a third group of astronomers has harnessed a different global web of observatories — including the Global Millimeter VLBI Array, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile and the Greenland Telescope — to capture a zoomed-out view of the black hole. Their image shows, for the first time, the base of the well-studied jet of energy and particles that arises from the center of the M87 galaxy and shoots across interstellar space. The image, generated by a vast international team led by Ru-Sen Lu from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China, was published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/26/science/astronomy-black-hole-m87.html?unlocked_article_code=c84WPomO3J9kqZbnulxp2a8nDUg0BsRnHxlaqTrweiXYLECQUExkDajoeb7BU3Xx2oBDDrU9vEWIRRInun7lBGnPKJk0K6vWxdbOFWMitWbJhsGWPucN6MobiIsY-Gk7EeAlDQo2jEeozY7YC-72QrDLZ-UZaUfbtkoZ0PS5NfJjJXvdj_W0PZDiWWii5xt8f4Bu-myZMdbv3d-E7bfKYHNNXLIFW45AuBcJXG8mhpVZBvc3ZwE_TTNHEE9kJi9l6JTbQFGLDr7r6AlYS_3smR9YWkeDa5lt3eEUpy6EczkDzENuiZRW5FDEg8I8DNPXX-_sZAgw7Q0tQ9ar2y0BY5B7&giftCopy=0_NoCopy&smid=url-share