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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 M87 Galaxy, as seen via the Hubble Space Telescope (NASA/Hubble). For the first time in a decade, the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy has erupted in an enormous gamma-ray flare, a rare and significant event that defied expectations in the latest analysis by astrophysicists. Several large collaborations, including the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), as well as the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope, and the MAGIC, VERITAS, HESS, and EAVN telescopes pooled their resources to observe the massive cosmic event, detailed in a new paper published in Astronomy and Astrophysics. M87 Black Hole Messier 87 is...

Explanation: What's happening to the big black hole in the center of our galaxy? It is sucking in matter from a swirling disk -- a disk that is magnetized, it has now been confirmed. Specifically, the black hole's accretion disk has recently been seen to emit polarized light, radiation frequently associated with a magnetized source. Pictured here is a close-up of Sgr A*, our Galaxy's central black hole, taken by radio telescopes around the world participating in the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration. Superposed are illustrative curved lines indicating polarized light likely emitted from swirling magnetized gas that will soon...

Polarized view of the black hole in M87. The lines mark the orientation of polarization, which is related to the magnetic field around the shadow of the black hole. Credit: EHT Collaboration ===================================================================== Wits University astrophysicists are the only two scientists on African continent that contributed to the study. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, a multinational team of over 300 scientists including two astrophysicists from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University), has revealed a new view of the massive object at the center of the M87 galaxy: how it looks in polarized light. This is the first time...

Explanation: Well over a thousand galaxies are known members of the Virgo Cluster, the closest large cluster of galaxies to our own local group. In fact, the galaxy cluster is difficult to appreciate all at once because it covers such a large area on the sky. This careful wide-field mosaic of telescopic images clearly records the central region of the Virgo Cluster through faint foreground dust clouds lingering above the plane of our own Milky Way galaxy. The cluster's dominant giant elliptical galaxy M87, is just below and to the left of the frame center. To the right of M87...

Astronomers say they have discovered a star cluster that has been thrown in the direction of Earth at a speed of more than two million miles per hour. The cluster, named HVGC-1, originated in the M87 galaxy and is expected to endlessly drift through space, rocketing through the voids between other galaxies. "Astronomers have found runaway stars before, but this is the first time we've found a runaway star cluster," said Nelson Caldwell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who is the lead author on a study which is set to be published in the The Astrophysical Journal. HVGC stands...

A galactic "super-volcano" in the massive galaxy M87 is erupting and blasting gas outwards, as witnessed by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and NSF's Very Large Array. The cosmic volcano is being driven by a giant black hole in the galaxy's center and preventing hundreds of millions of new stars from forming. Astronomers studying this black hole and its effects have been struck by the remarkable similarities between it and a volcano in Iceland that made headlines earlier this year. At a distance of about 50 million light years, M87 is relatively close to Earth and lies at the center of...