Posted on 01/27/2025 5:35:00 AM PST by Red Badger
A groundbreaking reanalysis of the M87 galaxy’s supermassive black hole, M87*, unveils intriguing new insights into the structure and behavior of its plasma environment. Credit: EHT collaboration
First Step on the Way to a Video of the Black Hole
In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration made history by releasing the first-ever image of a black hole—M87*, located at the center of the galaxy M87. This groundbreaking image was based on data collected in 2017. Now, the EHT team has analyzed additional data from their 2018 observations, revealing new findings.
The latest analysis shows that the brightest part of the ring surrounding M87* has shifted, likely due to turbulence in the rotating gas, known as the accretion disk. Scientists have also confirmed that the black hole’s axis of rotation is tilted away from Earth. Looking ahead, researchers aim to create a time-lapse “video” of M87*, offering a dynamic view of how the black hole evolves over time.
Observed and Theoretical Images of M87* Black Hole. Left: EHT images of M87* from the 2018 and 2017 observation campaigns. Middle: Example images from a general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulation at two different times. Right: Same simulation snapshots, blurred to match the EHT’s observational resolution. Credit: EHT collaboration Unveiling New Insights: The Latest Analysis of M87*
Six years after capturing the first-ever image of a black hole, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration has released a new analysis of M87*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87. This latest study combines data from observations made in 2017 and 2018, offering fresh insights into the structure and movement of plasma near the black hole’s event horizon.
The findings mark a major step forward in understanding the extreme conditions surrounding black holes and their environments. They provide valuable theoretical insights into some of the most intriguing mysteries of the universe.
“The black hole accretion environment is turbulent and dynamic. Since we can treat the 2017 and 2018 observations as independent measurements, we can constrain the black hole’s surroundings with a new perspective,” explains Hung-Yi Pu, assistant professor at National Taiwan Normal University. “This work highlights the transformative potential of observing the black hole environment evolving in time.”
Confirming the Luminous Ring’s Evolution
The 2018 observations confirm the presence of the luminous ring first captured in 2017, with a diameter of approximately 43 microarcseconds – consistent with theoretical predictions for the shadow of a 6.5-billion-solar-mass black hole. Notably, the brightest region of the ring has shifted 30 degrees counter-clockwise.
“The shift in the brightest region is a natural consequence of turbulence in the accretion disk around the black hole,” explains Abhishek Joshi, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “In our original theoretical interpretation of the 2017 observations, we predicted that the brightest region would most likely shift in the counterclockwise direction. We are very happy to see that the observations in 2018 confirmed this prediction!”
Orientation and Spin of M87’s Black Hole
The fact that the ring remains brightest on the bottom tells us a lot about the orientation of the black hole spin. Bidisha Bandyopadhyay, a Postdoctoral Fellow from Universidad de Concepción adds: “The location of the brightest region in 2018 also reinforces our previous interpretation of the black hole’s orientation from the 2017 observations: the black hole’s rotational axis is pointing away from Earth!”
Understanding M87’s Changing Black Hole Environment
Luciano Rezzolla, chair of theoretical astrophysics at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, remarks that “black holes as gigantic as M87* are expected to change only on very long timescales and it is not surprising therefore that much of what we have measured in 2017 has emerged also with observations made in 2018. Yet, the small differences we have found are very important to understand what is actually happening near M87*.
“ To use an equivalent that may help, we do not expect to see a difference in the structure of the rock when comparing two photos of Mount Everest taken with a separation of one year. However, we do expect to see differences in the clouds near the peak and we can use them to deduce, for instance, the direction of dominant winds or the three-dimensional properties of the rock that we cannot deduce from a simple two-dimensional photo.
“ This is what we have done in our theoretical analysis of the new data, much of which has been done in Frankfurt, and which has allowed us to better understand how matter falls onto M87* and the actual properties of M87* as a black hole. More of these observations will be made in the coming years and with increasing precision, with the ultimate goal of producing a movie of what actually happens near M87*.”
Supercomputer Models and Future Observations
Using a newly developed and extensive library of super-computer-generated images — three times larger than the library used for interpreting the 2017 observations — the team evaluated accretion models with data from both the 2017 and 2018 observations.
“When gas spirals into a black hole from afar, it can either flow in the same direction the black hole is rotating, or in the opposite direction. We found that the latter case is more likely to match the multi-year observations thanks to their relatively higher turbulent variability,” explains León Sosapanta Salas, a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam. “Analysis of the EHT data for M87 from later years (2021 and 2022) is already underway and promises to provide even more robust statistical constraints and deeper insights into the nature of the turbulent flow surrounding the black hole of M87.”
Reference: “The persistent shadow of the supermassive black hole of M87 – II. Model comparisons and theoretical interpretations” by Kazunori Akiyama, Ezequiel Albentosa-Ruíz, Antxon Alberdi, Walter Alef, Juan Carlos Algaba, Richard Anantua, Keiichi Asada, Rebecca Azulay, Uwe Bach, Anne-Kathrin Baczko, David Ball, Mislav Baloković, Bidisha Bandyopadhyay, John Barrett, Michi Bauböck, Bradford A. Benson, Dan Bintley, Lindy Blackburn, Raymond Blundell, Katherine L. Bouman, Geoffrey C. Bower, Michael Bremer, Roger Brissenden, Silke Britzen, Avery E. Broderick, Dominique Broguiere, Thomas Bronzwaer, Sandra Bustamante, John E. Carlstrom, Andrew Chael, Chi-kwan Chan, Dominic O. Chang, Koushik Chatterjee, Shami Chatterjee, Ming-Tang Chen, Yongjun Chen, Xiaopeng Cheng, Ilje Cho, Pierre Christian, Nicholas S. Conroy, John E. Conway, Thomas M. Crawford, Geoffrey B. Crew, Alejandro Cruz-Osorio, Yuzhu Cui, Brandon Curd, Rohan Dahale, Jordy Davelaar, Mariafelicia De Laurentis, Roger Deane, Jessica Dempsey, Gregory Desvignes, Jason Dexter, Vedant Dhruv, Indu K. Dihingia, Sheperd S. Doeleman, Sergio A. Dzib, Ralph P. Eatough, Razieh Emami, Heino Falcke, Joseph Farah, Vincent L. Fish, Edward Fomalont, H. Alyson Ford, Marianna Foschi, Raquel Fraga-Encinas, William T. Freeman, Per Friberg, Christian M. Fromm, Antonio Fuentes, Peter Galison, Charles F. Gammie, Roberto García, Olivier Gentaz, Boris Georgiev, Ciriaco Goddi, Roman Gold, Arturo I. Gómez-Ruiz, José L. Gómez, Minfeng Gu, Mark Gurwell, Kazuhiro Hada, Daryl Haggard, Ronald Hesper, Dirk Heumann, Luis C. Ho, Paul Ho, Mareki Honma, Chih-Wei L. Huang, Lei Huang, David H. Hughes, Shiro Ikeda, C. M. Violette Impellizzeri, Makoto Inoue, Sara Issaoun, David J. James, Buell T. Jannuzi, Michael Janssen, Britton Jeter, Wu Jiang, Alejandra Jiménez-Rosales, Michael D. Johnson, Svetlana Jorstad, Adam C. Jones, Abhishek V. Joshi, Taehyun Jung, Ramesh Karuppusamy, Tomohisa Kawashima, Garrett K. Keating, Mark Kettenis, Dong-Jin Kim, Jae-Young Kim, Jongsoo Kim, Junhan Kim, Motoki Kino, Jun Yi Koay, Prashant Kocherlakota, Yutaro Kofuji, Patrick M. Koch, Shoko Koyama, Carsten Kramer, Joana A. Kramer, Michael Kramer, Thomas P. Krichbaum, Cheng-Yu Kuo, Noemi La Bella, Sang-Sung Lee, Aviad Levis, Zhiyuan Li, Rocco Lico, Greg Lindahl, Michael Lindqvist, Mikhail Lisakov, Jun Liu, Kuo Liu, Elisabetta Liuzzo, Wen-Ping Lo, Andrei P. Lobanov, Laurent Loinard, Colin J. Lonsdale, Amy E. Lowitz, Ru-Sen Lu, Nicholas R. MacDonald, Jirong Mao, Nicola Marchili, Sera Markoff, Daniel P. Marrone, Alan P. Marscher, Iván Martí-Vidal, Satoki Matsushita, Lynn D. Matthews, Lia Medeiros, Karl M. Menten, Izumi Mizuno, Yosuke Mizuno, Joshua Montgomery, James M. Moran, Kotaro Moriyama, Monika Moscibrodzka, Wanga Mulaudzi, Cornelia Müller, Hendrik Müller, Alejandro Mus, Gibwa Musoke, Ioannis Myserlis, Hiroshi Nagai, Neil M. Nagar, Dhanya G. Nair, Masanori Nakamura, Gopal Narayanan, Iniyan Natarajan, Antonios Nathanail, Santiago Navarro Fuentes, Joey Neilsen, Chunchong Ni, Michael A. Nowak, Junghwan Oh, Hiroki Okino, Héctor Raúl Olivares Sánchez, Tomoaki Oyama, Feryal Özel, Daniel C. M. Palumbo, Georgios Filippos Paraschos, Jongho Park, Harriet Parsons, Nimesh Patel, Ue-Li Pen, Dominic W. Pesce, Vincent Piétu, Aleksandar PopStefanija, Oliver Porth, Ben Prather, Giacomo Principe, Dimitrios Psaltis, Hung-Yi Pu, Venkatessh Ramakrishnan, Ramprasad Rao, Mark G. Rawlings, Luciano Rezzolla, Angelo Ricarte, Bart Ripperda, Freek Roelofs, Cristina Romero-Cañizales, Eduardo Ros, Arash Roshanineshat, Helge Rottmann, Alan L. Roy, Ignacio Ruiz, Chet Ruszczyk, Kazi L. J. Rygl, Salvador Sánchez, David Sánchez-Argüelles, Miguel Sánchez-Portal, Mahito Sasada, Kaushik Satapathy, Tuomas Savolainen, F. Peter Schloerb, Jonathan Schonfeld, Karl-Friedrich Schuster, Lijing Shao, Zhiqiang Shen, Des Small, Bong Won Sohn, Jason SooHoo, León D. S. Salas, Kamal Souccar, Joshua S. Stanway, He Sun, Fumie Tazaki, Alexandra J. Tetarenko, Paul Tiede, Remo P. J. Tilanus, Michael Titus, Kenji Toma, Pablo Torne, Teresa Toscano, Efthalia Traianou, Tyler Trent, Sascha Trippe, Matthew Turk, Ilse van Bemmel, Huib Jan van Langevelde, Daniel R. van Rossum, Jesse Vos, Jan Wagner, Derek Ward-Thompson, John Wardle, Jasmin E. Washington, Jonathan Weintroub, Robert Wharton, Maciek Wielgus, Kaj Wiik, Gunther Witzel, Michael F. Wondrak, George N. Wong, Qingwen Wu, Nitika Yadlapalli, Paul Yamaguchi, Aristomenis Yfantis, Doosoo Yoon, André Young, Ziri Younsi, Wei Yu, Feng Yuan, Ye-Fei Yuan, J. Anton Zensus, Shuo Zhang, Guang-Yao Zhao and Shan-Shan Zhao, 22 January 2025, Astronomy & Astrophysics. DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202451296
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration brings together over 400 researchers from across the globe, including Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America. This international effort aims to capture the most detailed images of black holes ever obtained by creating a virtual telescope the size of Earth. By linking existing observatories with innovative technology, the EHT has developed an entirely new instrument with unprecedented angular resolution.
The project connects several telescopes worldwide, including ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-meter Telescope, the IRAM NOEMA Observatory, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT), the Submillimeter Array (SMA), the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT), the South Pole Telescope (SPT), the Kitt Peak Telescope, and the Greenland Telescope (GLT). Data collected from these observatories were processed at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) and MIT Haystack Observatory, with additional post-processing conducted by an international team across multiple institutions.
The EHT consortium is composed of 13 key stakeholder institutions, including the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the University of Arizona, the University of Chicago, the East Asian Observatory, Goethe University Frankfurt, the Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique, the Large Millimeter Telescope, the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, MIT Haystack Observatory, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Radboud University, and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
Anything we can see that far off happened a long, long, long, long, (repeat about 1,000 times) long time ago.
...in a galaxy far, far away...............
Something something Michelle Obama.
I hate it when I get sucked into these long articles!
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