An entirely new photograph shows a jet of material emerging from a black hole

Astronomers have captured for the first time the shadow of a black hole and the powerful jet of material emerging from it in a newly released image. The supermassive black hole is at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, or M87, and the observations were initially made in 2018 by combining the capabilities of multiple telescopes. The image can help astronomers gain more insight into how black holes behave and what enables them to launch energetic jets of material across the universe. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, the Greenland Telescope and the Global Millimetre VLBI Array of telescopes worked together to create a virtual Earth-size telescope and peer into the heart of M87, located 55 million light-years away. The black hole at M87’s galactic center is 6.5 billion times more massive than the sun and can also send powerful jets of material blasting across space and beyond its home galaxy.

The new image of a supermassive black hole has been released, showing the connection between the base of the jet and the matter swirling around it. Previous observations have shown the jet and black hole separately, but this new image completes the picture by showing the region around the black hole and the jet at the same time. As matter orbits around the black hole, it heats up and releases radiation in wavelengths of light, creating the ring structure seen glowing around the black hole’s shadow. The new image captured radio light emitted at a longer wavelength than the 2019 image, allowing researchers to see how the jet emerges from the ring of emission around the central supermassive black hole.