The Horizon Telescope event caught a jet from an active supermassive black hole

We looked at last year the first shot of a supermassive black hole, or of course its immediate surroundings. It was aptly named Event Horizon Telescope, which is actually a series of telescopes scattered around the Earth, creating a virtually planetary telescope that has only a few active “cells”, but it can catch up with long-term rotation monitoring. planets. In the same way, such distant, massive and only slowly changing objects are observed that such a long “exposure” does not matter much. –

At that time, it was still the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy with a really big black hole in the middle, next to which is Sagittarius A * in the middle of our Galaxy with its about 4 million Suns, just a dwarf. In the middle of M87 is an object with an estimated mass of up to 6.6 billion suns, thanks to which it has just been selected as the first target for EHT.

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In the case of Centaurus A, it is similar, because there are again jets from a black hole, which are also shown in the image of the entire galaxy. It combines the radiation of different spectra and you can see how the jets significantly change the overall appearance and basically the size of this galaxy. Thus, even here it could be assumed that EHT would provide a valuable reach. However, Centaurus A is generally very prominent in our sky, and in particular, the fifth is the brightest and is also one of the closest galaxies that are clearly visible in the radio spectrum. That’s exactly what EHT needed.

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EHT looked into the center of an elliptical galaxy between 10 and 16 million light-years away, where there is an active black hole with a mass of about 55 million suns. From our point of view, it is being fed by a flood of materials, some of which is sent away at high speed in polar jets, and thanks to the high energy imparted, this material glows in the X-ray and radio spectra.

One of these jets can be seen in incredible detail, which is also illustrated by the angle of view of 50 µas. It is about 50×10^-6 angular seconds, one angular second being a fraction of 1/3600 of an angular degree.

The resulting image is about 16 times sharper than any previous image showing the core of this galaxy. We can see the conical shape of the jet with particularly clear edges, which means that it may be a kind of hollow vortex of material, as previously suggested by some analyzes of other black holes. It seems that their authors were right, but it does not necessarily mean that the material flows only along the edges. This may be a sign of how the ejected matter is heated by interaction with the surrounding clouds.

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