The Most Intimate Portrait Yet of a Black Hole - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, an international team of radio astronomers that has been staring down the throat of a giant black hole for years, on Wednesday published what it called the most intimate portrait yet of the forces that give rise to quasars
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The black hole in question is a monster 6.5 billion times as massive as the sun, and lies in the center of an enormous elliptical galaxy, Messier 87, about 55 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo.
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Now, seen through the radio equivalent of polarized sunglasses, the M87 black hole appears as a finely whiskered vortex, like the spinning fan blades of a jet engine, pumping matter into the black hole and energy outward into space.
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“Now we can actually see the patterns of these fields in M87 and begin to study how the black hole is funneling material to its center,”
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Janna Levin, an astrophysicist at Barnard College of Columbia University who studies black holes but was not part of the Event Horizon team, called the results “thrilling,” as they revealed details about how a black hole can create “a lethal, powerful, astronomical ray gun that extends thousands of light-years.”
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The results were announced on Wednesday in two papers published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, and in a third paper, by Ciriaco Goddi of Radboud University in the Netherlands and a large international cast, that has been accepted by the same journal.
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“The direction and intensity of the polarization in the image tells us about the magnetic fields near the event horizon of the black hole,” said Andrew Chael, an astrophysicist at Princeton University who is part of the Event Horizon team.
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Black holes are bottomless pits in space-time, where gravity is so powerful that not even light can escape; whatever enters essentially disappears from the universe. The cosmos is littered with black holes.
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In 2009, eager to explore the underlying mechanisms and to verify Einstein’s predictions about black holes, Dr. Doeleman and his colleagues formed the Event Horizon Telescope, an international collaboration that now comprises some 300 astronomers from 13 institutions.
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Black holes were first “heard” colliding in 2015, by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. Now they could be seen, as an inky portal of nothingness framed by a swirling doughnut of radiant gas in the center of the galaxy Messier 87.
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It took another two years for researchers to produce the polarized images released on Wednesday.Jets and lobes of radio, X-ray and other forms of energy extend more than 100,000 light-years from the black hole in M87.
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Most of that matter falls into the black hole, but some is pushed out, like toothpaste, by enormous pressures and magnetic fields. How all of this energy arises and is marshaled remains unknown to astronomers.
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“The E.H.T. images also provide hints that the bright jet in M87 is actually powered from the rotational energy of the black hole, which twists the magnetic fields as it rotates,” said Michael Johnson another Event Horizon member from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
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Apparently it isn’t terribly hungry; the black hole is eating “a paltry” one-thousandth of the mass of the sun per year.“Yet it’s enough to launch powerful jets that stretch for thousands of light years, and it’s radiant enough for us to capture it with the E.H.T.,” he said.