The supermassive black hole sits at the heart of the distant galaxy M87 where it slowly feeds on cosmic dust, gas and other stellar material. The black hole found itself at the centre of attention earlier this year thanks to an international collaboration of astronomers who imaged the black hole’s shadow. The monumental achievement was achieved through daisy-chaining together Earth’s most powerful radio telescopes. The space agency NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope also had a role to play in the discovery.
Black holes are powerful wells of gravity that trap everything, including light itself, past their so-called event horizon.
Astronomers behind the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team worked around this problem by using radio frequencies to images the area surrounding the black hole’s point of no return.
NASA’s Hubble, on the other hand, took a more direct approach by imaging a bright trail of light escaping from the black hole.
NASA said: “Hubble helped confirm the giant galaxy M87 harbours a black hole 2.6 billion times more massive than our Sun and revealed stunning detail in the jet of subatomic particles streaming away from the central black hole.”
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The Hubble picture features a bright source of light in the upper-left corner – the galaxy M87 or Messier 87.
Extending from the galaxy and the supermassive black hole at its centre is a streak of blue-violet light.
The black hole itself cannot be seen but the blue streak of light is a so-called relativistic jet.
Relativistic jets or astrophysical jets are beams of ionised particles ejected from black holes that surround themselves in a dense shroud of stellar material.
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As clouds of dust and gas are accelerated around a black hole to near the speed of light, most of the material falls towards the event horizon over time.
Some of the superheated material, however, escapes before it is sucked in and shoots out across the cosmos in a bright beam of light.
NASA said: “NASA space telescopes have previously studied a jet extending more than 1,000 light-years away from the centre of M87.
“The jet is made of particles travelling near the speed of light, shooting out at high energies from close to the event horizon.
“The EHT was designed in part to study the origin of this jet and others like it.
“A blob of matter in the jet called HST-1, discovered by Hubble astronomers in 1999, has undergone a mysterious cycle of brightening and dimming.”
NASA shared its picture of the black hole’s bright jet under the hashtag #BlackHoleWeek.
The news comes after the space agency shared its first-ever observations of a black hole tearing a star to shreds.
