When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.M87* and its cosmic blowtorch-like jet as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. | Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Lessing (Stanford University), E. Baltz (Stanford University), M. Shara (AMNH), J. DePasquale (STScI)Using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), astronomers have tracked a 3,000 light-years-long cosmic blowtorch back to its source, the supermassive black hole M87*, which bears the distinction of being the first black hole imaged by humanity. The breakthrough could help scientists better understand what creates these powerful jets of charged particles that travel at speeds approaching the speed of light.M87* sits at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87), located around 55 million light-years from Earth. The historic image of this supermassive black hole, which has a mass equivalent to that of 6.5 billion suns, was captured by the EHT in 2017 and was released to the public in April 2019.AdvertisementAdvertisementNot only is this supermassive black hole more massive than the one at the heart of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), which has a mass around 4 million solar masses, but M87* is also an active black hole. That means it is greedily devouring its surrounding gas and dust as well as launching powerful jets from its poles. However, the exact source of these jets around their black hole central engines and the precise mechanism powering them is still something of a mystery.To better understand the jet of this supermassive black hole, astronomers turned to the EHT’s observations of M87* taken in 2021 using a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). This technique can reveal structures around supermassive black holes at small scales, such as the glowing golden ring of super-hot matter that dominates the 2019 image of M87*, which is effectively the “shadow” of this black hole. Using these newer observations, the …
