Although supermassive black holes are common throughout the Universe, we don’t have many direct images of them. The problem is that while they can have a mass of millions or billions of stars, even the nearest supermassive black holes have tiny apparent sizes.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has captured images of black hole jets in the past:

• In 2019, the EHT captured the first image of a black hole, which showed the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87. The image also showed that the jet’s outer edges emit radiation, which challenges theoretical models of jets. 
• In 2021, the EHT captured images of the “dark heart” of a radio galaxy called Centaurus A. The images show that the jet’s parallel edges narrow into a cone near the black hole. The EHT can also capture the polarization of radio light coming from the area

The EHT has captured images of both black holes:

• Sagittarius A * The black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is about 27,000 light-years away from Earth. The EHT revealed an image of Sagittarius A* in 2022. 
• M87 The black hole in the center of the elliptical galaxy M87 is about 55 million light-years away from Earth. The EHT captured the silhouette of the black hole’s glowing gasses in 2019. 

The event horizon is a boundary that surrounds a black hole. It’s called an event horizon because it’s impossible to observe any events that take place inside it.

The way light bends around the event horizon shows the object’s powerful gravity. For example, when something gets near an event horizon, the image of that object will redden and dim as gravity distorts light from it. 

In a black hole, the singularity is completely enclosed by the event horizon. The curvature of spacetime caused by the singularity is so strong that light cannot escape inside the event horizon. This means that objects inside the event horizon, including the singularity itself, cannot be observed directly

The event horizon is the spherical outer boundary of a black hole loosely considered to be its “surface.” It is the point, according to NASA, that the gravitational influence of the black hole becomes so great that not even light is fast enough to escape it.

The latest observations focus on a black hole region known as 3C 84, or Perseus A. It is a radio-bright source in a galaxy more than 200 million light-years away. Even the latest iteration of the EHT can’t resolve the horizon glow of the black hole as we’ve done with M87* and Sag A*, but it can see the bright region surrounding the black hole, where magnetic fields are particularly intense

The 3C 84 black hole is located in the galaxy NGC 1275, which is part of the Perseus cluster. The galaxy is not just distant, it also has a central region rich in dust, which shrouds the black hole. Optical light can’t penetrate the region, but radio light can. The Event Horizon Telescope can also capture the polarization of radio light coming from the area. This is important because charged particles within a strong magnetic field emit polarized light. By mapping this polarization astronomers can study magnetic fields

Supermassive black holes are the largest type of black hole, with masses that can be millions to billions of times the mass of the sun. However, even the nearest supermassive black holes have tiny apparent sizes. 

The Event Horizon Telescope has directly imaged two supermassive black holes: the black hole at the center of the Milky Way and the black hole in the elliptical galaxy Messier 87. 

The Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, is more than 25,000 light years from Earth. It has an estimated mass millions of times that of the sun. 

Although it’s not known exactly how supermassive black holes form, some theories include:

• A chain reaction of collisions of stars in compact star clusters 
• The merger of a number of smaller black holes 
• Very large gas clouds collapsing together and rapidly accreting a huge mass 
• The collapse of a stellar cluster, a large group of stars all falling together and forming one big black hole 

Yes, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has captured images of black hole jets in the past:

• In 2020, UCL astrophysicist Dr Ziri Younsi published the first image of a black hole-powered jet. 
• In 2021, a paper published in Nature Astronomy reported that the EHT captured the birth of a powerful jet emitting from a black hole. 
• The EHT has also captured images of the ring of light produced by matter falling into the black hole at the center of the galaxy M87. The EHT is a global network of radio telescopes that combines data from several very-long-baseline interferometry stations around Earth. The EHT’s observational targets include the two black holes with the largest angular diameter as observed from Earth.

Black holes are invisible because they don’t emit light. However, the gas that surrounds black holes emits radio waves that can be observed by ground-based telescopes. The EHT also observes the nearby surroundings of black holes, which radiate. By observing these regions, the EHT can see structures that result from the black hole’s gravity. 

The EHT uses a method called “very long baseline interferometry” (VLBI) to combine multiple telescopes into a single virtual observatory. This combined power gives the EHT the resolution to observe objects the size of a supermassive black hole’s event horizon. 

The EHT also uses machine learning to fill in the gaps in its image.

Telescopes can’t see black holes because they don’t emit light. However, black holes warp space, which causes starlight from anything behind them to deflect and amplify. 

Here are some ways telescopes can get a view of the Milky Way’s black hole:

• X-ray-detecting telescopes Can image material spiraling into a black hole, revealing its location. For example, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory can do this. 
• Hubble Space Telescope Can measure the speed of gas and stars orbiting a point in space that may be a black hole. 
• Telescopes taken simultaneously Can be combined to piece together images of the black hole. For example, several different telescopes, both on the ground and in space, have taken images of the disk of the Milky Way.

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