Second Image of the First Ever Imaged Black Hole Confirms Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity (photo)

The second image of the first black hole ever captured by humanity shows its shadow still lingering a year later.

The newly released image of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87) was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) on April 21, 2018, one year and ten days after it was first captured.

Like the April 2017 image, this second image of the supermassive black hole known as M87* shows a glowing golden ring representing matter swirling around the black hole and being heated to extreme temperatures. At the heart of this ring is still a dark shadow, as predicted by Einstein's 1915 theory of gravity, known as general relativity.

"A fundamental requirement of science is to be able to reproduce results," Keiichi Asada, associate research fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, said in a statement. "The confirmation of the ring in a completely new data set is a huge milestone for our collaboration and a strong indication that we are looking at the shadow of a black hole and the material orbiting it."

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The new image of this supermassive black hole confirms the accuracy of this gravitational theory, which predicts that the width of M87* should remain the same as long as its mass does not change significantly, thus confirming that a black hole's radius is indeed linked to its mass.

The image also confirms that there have been some changes in the brightness of the disk, which are related to the turbulence in the matter around the black hole and are gradually being transmitted to it.

M87* in 2017 and 2018: what changed and what stayed the same

The supermassive black hole M87* is located 55 million light-years from Earth, at the heart of the M87 galaxy, and has a mass equivalent to about 6.5 billion suns.

M87* powers the bright, active Galactic Core (AGN) of the elliptical galaxy as it gradually feeds on surrounding matter, heating what it doesn't consume with powerful magnetic fields, drawing material towards the poles before being released at almost is blown outwards at the speed of light.

M87* made history when it was first captured by the EHT on April 11, 2017. Further data analysis of the M87* EHT image showed how the light was polarized around the black hole, providing hints about the structure of jet-launching magnetic fields and the nature of the heated gas, or plasma, surrounding the supermassive black hole.

The 2017 and 2018 images of M87* are remarkably similar, with the bright rings around the supermassive black hole remaining the same size.

This is an important observation because it shows that because the mass of this supermassive black hole has not changed significantly, nor has the diameter of its outer layer, the light-trapping surface, called the event horizon, acts as the outer boundary of the black hole . hole. This helps confirm general relativity's suggestion that a black hole's diameter depends on its mass.

"One of the remarkable properties of a black hole is that its radius is strongly dependent on just one quantity: its mass," said NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Nitika Yadlapalli Yurk. 'Since M87* is not rapidly accumulating material (which would increase its mass), general relativity tells us that its radius will remain essentially unchanged over the course of human history. It's quite exciting to see our data confirm this prediction."

Scientists expect that the black hole M87* is not accumulating matter fast enough for its growth to be noticeable over the course of a human lifetime, and this new image also helps confirm that this is likely the case.

However, that doesn't mean nothing has changed for the M87* between the two EHT close-ups. In the new image, the brightest peak of the ring around the black hole has been shifted counterclockwise by 30 degrees. This is something the EHT team expected to see and confirms the variability of the turbulent matter around the black hole.

"The biggest change where the brightness peak shifted around the ring is actually something we predicted when we published the first results in 2019," said Britt Jeter, a postdoctoral researcher at the Academia Sinica Institute for Astronomy. 'While general relativity says that the ring size should remain fairly fixed, the emission from the turbulent, messy accretion disk around the black hole will cause the brightest part of the ring to wobble around a common center.

"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."

What next for the supermassive black hole M87*?

The first image of M87* and the in-depth analysis of the data used to create it ushered in a new era of black hole research and also gave scientists a new laboratory to test general relativity.

The next step in this research was to collect repeat observations of this supermassive black hole, with this new image representing the first use of data collected by the EHT from M87* after 2017.

The EHT got a helping hand in collecting new and improved images of M87* in 2018 when, five months after its construction was completed in the Arctic Circle, the Greenland Telescope joined the other antennas in the array that make up this sized telescope of the earth exists. This improved the EHT's image fidelity and coverage of the sky, especially oriented from north to south.

The repeated observations of M87* also allowed the EHT to be used to test breakthrough developments in an astronomical technique called high-frequency radio interferometry, as well as independent imaging and modeling techniques.

"The inclusion of the Greenland Telescope in our array filled critical gaps in our Earth-sized telescope," said Rohan Dahale, PhD student from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía. "The inclusion of the Greenland Telescope in our array has filled critical gaps in our telescope on Earth."