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A new image acquired by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which uses a combination of radio telescopes in the world as a virtual giant radio telescope, has captured the image of a jet ejected from a supermassive black hole more clearly than ever before.
This image captures the supermassive black hole at the center of NGC 5128 Centauri A, one of the most powerful radio sources in the night sky, at resolutions 10 and 16 times the size previously possible.
The research team led by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany and Radobaudo University in the Netherlands said that this observation made it possible to see and study radio jets outside of galaxies at a scale smaller than the distance that light travels in one day. It is possible to clearly see how a huge jet emitted from a supermassive black hole is born.
One expert said, “Unlike the black hole in the center of the Milky Way, we can see that it is emitting more energy than the black hole in the center of the Milky Way.”
Jets emanating from black holes are a phenomenon in which matter escapes from the black hole’s strong gravitational pull and pulls millions of light-years away without being trapped inside the black hole. In this image, you can see that the part away from the center of the jet is getting brighter somehow. This is a phenomenon that can also be seen with jets such as the M87, but this time it was seen so prominently that it was never before. In theory, a jet could collide with galactic gas and overheat, but the researchers say it has the potential to give new insights into plasma physics both inside and around the jet.
The research team is planning to use a space telescope to take high-resolution images of the environment surrounding the black hole at the center of Centauri A with shorter wavelengths. Also, ultimately, as in the case of M87, the goal is to grasp the image of the black hole itself, not the vicinity of the black hole. Related information can be found here.
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