A newly remastered image of the black hole at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87) peels back the layers of the black hole to reveal photons thrown by the object’s enormous gravitational influence.
The black hole at the heart of M87, located 55 million light-years from Earth, has been the subject of Event Horizon Telescopefirst-ever image of a black hole, released in 2019. The image, which closely resembled theoretical predictions of what supermassive black holes and their immediate surroundings should look like, showed a golden ring of material racing around the outer edge of the black hole, the light-trapping surface called the event horizon. But hidden by this material, astronomers expected to find an artifact of the black hole’s gravitational influence, a thin, bright circle called a photon ring.
It is this ring that the researchers behind this remastered image wanted to discover. To do this, the team took the First EHT image of the M87 supermassive black hole and stripped various elements of the image.
Related: Why is the very first photo of a black hole an orange ring?
“We turned off the spotlight to see the fireflies,” Avery Broderick, an astrophysicist at Perimeter Institute and the University of Waterloo in Canada and the project’s principal investigator, said in a statement. statement. “We were able to do something profound – resolve a fundamental signature of gravity around a black hole.”
The team used an imaging algorithm built into the EHT to isolate and extract the bright golden ring from telescope observations of the M87 black hole, which has a mass equal to about 6.5 billion suns. Scientists were also able to use this technique to spot the distinct “fingerprint” of an astrophysical jet blown by the black hole.
These jets are created from materials around supermassive black holes that are gradually being “fed” to the surface of the central cosmic titan. Because M87’s supermassive black hole is a voracious eater of matter, it blasts these jets frequently. This is different from the much smaller black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), which consumes so little matter that scientists have compared it to a human eating a grain of rice every million years.
“The approach we took involved taking advantage of our theoretical understanding of how these black holes look to build a custom model for the EHT data,” said Dominic Pesce, a member of the team on the new research and astrophysicist based at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. , said in the statement. “This model decomposes the reconstructed image into the two elements that interest us most, so that we can study the two elements individually rather than mixed together.”
The new remastered image is the latest in a series of stunning black hole-related achievements for the Event Horizon Telescope. Work from the planet-sized observatory allows researchers to study supermassive black holes – once considered impossible to view because no light can escape across the event horizon – with incredible detail.
In 2021, following the first image of M87’s central supermassive black hole, the EHT produced an additional image that showed the black hole in polarized light. It was the first time that polarization, the signature of magnetic fields, was observed around a black hole.
And earlier this year, the collaboration released a image of Sgr A* in the heart of the Milky Way for the first time.
The new work on Photon Rings continues the tradition established by the EHT of seeing these cosmic titans in unprecedented detail.
“The result was possible because the EHT is a computational instrument at its core,” Broderick said. “It’s as much about algorithms as it is about steel. State-of-the-art algorithmic developments have allowed us to probe key features of the image while rendering the rest in the EHT’s native resolution.”
The team’s research is discussed in an article published Tuesday (August 16) in The Astrophysical Journal.
Follow us on Twitter @Espacedotcom and on Facebook.