SPACE — Several years ago, astronomers were able to get the first photo of a black hole. Black holes are powerful and difficult to capture, wild objects. Black holes are so dense that not even light can escape their gravity.
However, scientists managed to image a black hole in the galaxy M87 in 2019. The black hole is known as M87*.
Two months ago, observations showed that the supermassive black hole about 55 million light years from Earth was rotating, dragging along its magnetic field and the fabric of space and time nearby. These observations were made with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which combines data from several radio telescopes around the world to create a virtual telescope the size of the Earth.
Earlier this month, astronomers analyzed images of black holes obtained by the EHT in 2021. Scientists found that their magnetic fields are strong enough to sometimes prevent them from devouring surrounding matter.
Now, new analysis of the images carried out by part of the team has revealed that magnetic fields are also responsible for slowing down the black hole’s rotation. It’s like a spinning top that slows down as time goes by.
“We can conclusively say that the 2021 EHT image shows that energy flows near the black hole,” Andrew Chael, an astrophysicist at Princeton University in New Jersey and lead author of the new study, told Space.com.
“We need future images with higher sensitivity to determine 100 percent whether energy is flowing out of the surface of the black hole itself.”
The energy released into the depths of space during this process of braking or deceleration of rotation flows outward like a “lightsaber” in the movies Star Wars. That energy escapes across millions of light years” through structures called relativistic jets, which extend up to 10 times the length of our Milky Way galaxy.
“If you took the Earth, turned it all into TNT and exploded it 1,000 times a second for millions of years, that’s the amount of energy we would get from M87,” said study co-author George Wong of Princeton University.
The fact that black holes can lose energy is one of the predictions of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Scientists know that some of the lost energy may be caused by magnetic fields. However, they do not know exactly how this process occurs.
The findings from this new study show that the energy escaping from a black hole follows the direction of its magnetic field. The research team also considered the theoretical but nonetheless intriguing possibility that the energy pushed out of M87* could flow to other black holes.
It’s likely that the outflow of energy pushes the jet out of the black hole, which previous research suggests varies over an 11-year cycle. Models suggest the amount of energy escaping from black holes is similar to that required by jets, although astronomers are not yet completely sure.
The research is described in a paper published last week in The Astrophysical Journal.
2023-11-21 23:13:00
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