By Nadia Drake
A network of radio telescopes has produced the most detailed observations yet of a supermassive black hole in one distant galaxy’s churning heart. The observations, reported online September 27 in Science, may help explain how some active galactic nuclei launch powerful plasma jets thousands of light-years into space.
“This is a tremendous technical achievement,” Stanford University astrophysicist Roger Blandford says of the new observations. “It’s a step along the road to an ambitious goal of imaging a black hole in a galactic nucleus.”
The Event Horizon Telescope network, when complete, will focus on the black holes that power galaxies, cosmic engines so extreme that they could test Einstein’s theory of general relativity. In 2009, astronomers aimed the partially complete radio telescope array at M87, located 53.5 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. The bright, supergiant elliptical galaxy has a black hole weighing more than 6 billion suns churning in its core.