Scientists have created new secrets from what may be the most famous record in modern astronomical history. The iconic image shows the glowing gas ring around the supermassive black hole in the center of galaxy M87; Its April 2019 release made headlines around the world.
Now the 300-strong team behind the telescope’s network known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has mapped part of the magnetic fields around the hole in spacetime. Field lines force electrons and an atomic nucleus into helical paths. Charged particles emit electromagnetic radiation – those sub-millimeter waves that make the area around the black hole shine.
In the updated EHT image, magnetic fields appear in the brighter lower half of the ring. Here matter is racing towards the observer, most likely as part of a large-scale accretion disk made of nearly hot, fast-light particles. At right angles to this inferno, the black hole blows a huge beam of particles thousands of light-years away into space, as images from other telescopes show.
So far, it is unclear how exactly a black hole produces this jet. Experts have long suspected that magnetic fields play a role. Data now available may cause problems for 95 of the 120 models discussed previously, the EHT collaboration writes at One Of two Current technical articles For magnetic fields. Only those explanations remained that explain the origin of the plane with rapidly changing magnetic fields near the event horizon.
At the time of registration in 2017, the Event Horizon Telescope consisted of eight sub-millimeter observatories between Europe, Hawaii and Antarctica. They all focused on the center of the M87 galaxy at the same time. Then the scientists combined the footage with the supercomputers and calculated the most likely appearance of the glowing ring.
The magnetic field cycles can be reconstructed because a portion of the radiation captured by the EHT is linearly polarized. In this case, electromagnetic waves do not swing violently in all directions, but in a strictly regulated manner in one plane. Such radiation escapes wherever the charged particles are forced into circular paths; In this case, experts talk about the emission of the synchrotron.
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