A famous black hole is getting a second look from astronomers

Hello Darkness, our old friend, we have come to look at you again.

At the center of Messier 87, a giant galaxy 55 million light-years from Earth, there is a darkness 24 billion miles wide and as massive as 6.5 billion suns — a trapdoor to infinity called a black hole.

In 2017, a group of astronomers operating the Event Horizon Telescope, a global network of radio telescopes, produced an image of the black hole in Messier 87, or M87, the first image of any black hole ever. It revealed a flaming, slightly lopsided cake of hot gas swirling around a dark vacuum like water circling a drain, just as Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted in 1915. When the resulting image was revealed in 2019, it made front-page news. Sales outlets all over the world. It is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The same team of scientists has done it again, but this time better. In 2018, a year after the first image was taken, astronomers again peered into the darkness of M87 using a slightly expanded grid that provided higher resolution. The result was published last week In the Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysicsshows the same lumpy cake and the same central hole in even tastier detail, suggesting that astronomers got things right the first time.

“The first image of a black hole looked so similar to mathematical predictions that it seemed like a mere coincidence,” says Dominic Zhang, Ph.D., physicist. said the Harvard University candidate who works on the Event Horizon team In a press release Issued by the Center for Astrophysics/Harvard and Smithsonian University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the project is based.

“Having the opportunity to conduct new tests using new data, using a new telescope, and seeing the same structure, is a crucial confirmation of our most important conclusions,” he said.

There was one change in the ring around M87's black hole. Its brightest mass has moved about 30 degrees counterclockwise around the ring from a year ago. Astronomers said they expected that the hot spot would move.

“While general relativity says the size of the ring should remain more or less constant, the emission from the chaotic, turbulent accretion disk around the black hole will cause the brightest part of the ring to wobble around a common center,” says Brett Jeter, a postdoctoral fellow. In the academy. The Sineca Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan said in a press release. “The amount of fluctuation we see over time is something we can use to test our theories about the magnetic field and plasma environment around the black hole.”