The sensitivity of the GBT’s 100-meter collecting surface enabled astronomers to resolve both the large and small-scale parts of the ring and see the finer details.
#M87 black hole full
While VLBA provided a full view of both the jet and the black hole, ALMA allowed the scientists to resolve M87’s bright radio core, and create a sharp picture. Using many different telescopes and instruments gave the team a more complete view of the structure of the supermassive black hole and its jet than was previously possible with EHT, and all of the telescopes were required to paint a full picture. If you think of it like a fire-breathing monster, before, we could see the dragon and the fire, but now we can see the dragon breathing the fire.” This puts the ring in context- and it’s bigger than we thought. “With GMVA, including the premier instruments at NRAO and GBO, we’re observing at a lower frequency so we’re seeing more detail- and now we know there are more details to see.”Įduardo Ros, an astronomer and the Scientific Coordinator for Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy added, “We’ve seen the ring before, but now we see the jet. “M87 has been observed over many decades, and 100 years ago we knew the jet was there, but we couldn’t place it in context,” said Ru-Sen Lu, an astronomer at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, leader of a Max Planck Research Group at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and lead author of the new paper.
The image of its dense, dark core framed by an amorphous glowing ring made international headlines. It was the first black hole to be captured in an image, created by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) and made public in 2019. The SMBH at the center of the M87 galaxy is the most recognizable in the Universe. The Global mm-VLBI Array (GMVA) united radio telescopes around the world to produce these new results, including the National Science Foundation’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and Green Bank Observatory (GBO), Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), and Green Bank Telescope (GBT). The observations published today in Nature. What’s more, the observations have revealed that the black hole’s ring is much larger than scientists previously believed. Scientists studying the supermassive black hole at the heart of the M87 galaxy have revealed the origins of the monster’s powerful jet and imaged the jet and its source together for the first time.
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