New picture of famous black hole reveals its swirling magnetic field
A view of the M87 supermassive black hole in polarised light EHT Collaboration/ESO
The first picture of a black hole’s shadow just got even more interesting. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration released the first direct image of a black hole in 2019, and while the picture on its own was impressive, it wasn’t the scientific smorgasbord some had hoped for. Now, researchers have added polarised light to the picture, giving us an idea of how magnetic fields around a supermassive black hole create powerful jets of matter.
“It was not a lot of information about the actual physics of the gas around the black hole,” says Sara Issaoun, an EHT team member at Radboud University in the Netherlands. “Looking at it in polarised light told us information about the magnetic field of the black hole.”