On April 10, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) telescope team presented the world’s first image of a black hole event horizon, a zone whose boundaries nothing, even light, can leave. This giant black hole with a mass of approximately 6.5 billion solar masses is located in the elliptical galaxy Messier 87 (M87).
Now this new image, taken with the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope (Spitzer), demonstrates the entire M87 galaxy entirely in infrared light. The picture taken earlier with the EHT telescope (lower inset) differs in that it represents the radio spectrum of the galaxy and shows the shadow cast by a black hole on the surrounding material, glowing with high-energy light.
When the material falls on the central supermassive black hole of the galaxy M87, a huge amount of gravitational energy is released in the form of two oppositely directed jets. In the presented picture you can see both jets (upper frame). The jet located to the right is directed almost toward the Earth, but nevertheless it is projected when observing not a point, but a line of small length. The shock wave formed when a jet collides with the material of the galaxy is observed at the point where this jet starts to bend in the image.
The second jet moves very fast in the direction away from the Earth, therefore it is not observed as a line in almost all wavelength ranges. However, the shock wave generated by this jet when it collides with material of interstellar space is still visible in the image. Located to the left of the center of the galaxy, this structure resembles an inverted C.
Elliptical galaxy Messier 87 – a giant galaxy around a giant black hole
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