Groundbreaking images from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) reveal a relativistic jet launched by the supermassive black hole in Centaurus A, with 16 times greater resolution than previous observations. This breakthrough offers key insights into matter dynamics near these cosmic giants.
Over two years ago, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, led by Dr. Shep Doeleman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, achieved the historic first image of a black hole's shadow. By linking eight radio telescopes worldwide into an Earth-sized virtual array, they pushed observational astronomy to new frontiers.
In 2017, while imaging the iconic M87 black hole, the EHT team also targeted Centaurus A, located 12 million light-years away. Discovered in 1949, this galaxy ranks among the brightest and largest radio sources visible in the night sky.
The resulting images vividly capture the origin of the elongated radio jets streaming from the galaxy's supermassive black hole.
Supermassive black holes devour nearly everything in their grasp, yet some matter escapes to form powerful jets spanning millions of light-years. Though their launch mechanism remains elusive, these jets represent among the universe's most energetic phenomena.
These views resolve details down to about 0.6 light-days around the 55 million solar mass black hole.
"This is the first time we've imaged an extragalactic radio jet at scales smaller than a light-day," notes astronomer Michael Janssen from Germany's Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, lead author in Nature Astronomy. "We're witnessing the birth of a colossal jet from a supermassive black hole up close."
Notably, the jet's outer regions glow brighter than those nearer the black hole—a puzzle researchers aim to solve. Future observations with space-based telescopes promise even finer details at shorter wavelengths.
