Big and little black holes feed the same way

London, Jul 21 (Prensa Latina) No matter the size of a black hole, they all appear to feed the same way, the Nature magazine published. An international team anchored by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, which is known for capturing the first image of a black hole in the galaxy Messier 87, has now imaged the heart of the nearby radio galaxy Centaurus A in unprecedented detail.

July 21, 2021
07:07

The astronomers pinpoint the location of the central supermassive black hole and reveal how a gigantic jet is being born. Most remarkably, only the outer edges of the jet seem to emit radiation, which challenges our theoretical models of jets.

We see up close and personally how a monstrously gigantic jet launched by a supermassive black hole is being born,’ said astronomer Michael Janssen of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn and Radboud University Nijmegen, who led the study, published July 19 in Nature Astronomy

Specialists pointed out that unlike all observations previously made to these phenomena, they were now able to capture images of a jet at a 10-time higher frequency, and with a resolution 16 times sharper.

Black holes are cold remnants of ancient stars, so dense that no material particle is able to escape their powerful gravitational force, not even light.

pgh/Pll/oda / ghp