#m87*

[mindblowingscience]

'Totally unexpected': Stunning new imagery shows big changes in the 1st black hole ever captured by humanity (photo, video)

"This tells us that the magnetized plasma swirling near the event horizon is far from static; it's dynamic and complex, pushing our theoreti

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has captured stunning, newly revealed images of the supermassive black hole that lies at the heart of the galaxy M87. The EHT made this black hole, known as M87*, famous in April 2019 when it was revealed as the first black hole ever imaged by humanity. These images of M87*, located around 55 million light-years from Earth, show that the polarization of the magnetic fields around the black hole reversed over a period of four years. The new observations of M87* also show the telltale signs of a jet of matter emerging from around the black hole, with its base connected to the bright ring around the outer boundary, or "event horizon," around M87*.

Continue Reading.

[colorpicked-pride-flags-jwst]

[Non-Webb Wednesdays] Feugender flag colorpicked from Event Horizon Telescope image of supermassive black hole M87*

[androgynousbirdtale]

🌌 The Collaboration that Brought you the First Image of a Black Hole Just Released Photos of its Massive Jet

By Matthew Williams - February 06, 2026

A Hubble Space Telescope image of the giant elliptical galaxy M87 with its blowtorch-like jet. The visible part of this giant stream of particles spans around 3000 light-years. Credits: NASA/ESA/STScI/AMNH/Stanford University/STScI

In 2019, the international collaboration known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) made history by producing the first-ever image of a black hole. The object in question was the supermassive black hole (SMBH) residing at the center of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy, located about 55 million light-years away. The SMBH, designated M87*, is also noted for the powerful streams of charged particles emanating from its poles that travel close to the speed of light. This "relativistic jet," as they are known, is powered by the SMBH's powerful gravity and rapid rotation.

Using the technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), where light is combined from multiple observations (or observatories) to create a detailed picture, astronomers were able to put accurate constraints on the size and mass of this gravitational behemoth - 25,000 AU (3.7 trillion km; 2.3 trillion mi) in diameter and with a mass of over 6.5 billion Suns. However, astronomers were still unsure exactly where the jet originated around the black hole. Using data collected by the EHT on this jet, based on observations made in 2021, an international team of researchers has uncovered clues about the jet's origin.

The study was led by Saurabh, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR), Hendrik Müller of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), and Sebastiano von Fellenberg, formerly a member of the MPIfR and currently a researcher at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA). They were joined by the EHT Collaboration, consisting of 300 members from 60 scientific institutions worldwide. Their research was detailed in a paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

New images from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration show a dynamic environment with changing polarization patterns. Credit: EHT Collaboration.

Read more below.

The Collaboration that Brought you the First Image of a Black Hole Just Released Photos of its Massive Jet

Recently published data from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) of the galaxy Messier 87 facilitate new insights into the direct environment

[quiltofstars]

M87 // Rolf Olsen

M87, also called Virgo A, is an extremely radio-loud galaxy, meaning it emits a lot of light in the radio. The source of this radio? Likely a supermassive black hole at its core!

This black hole, called M87* (M87-star), is about 6 billion times the mass of the Sun and has a size of about 120 AU, or about 3 times the distance between the Sun and Pluto!

M87* was the first black hole to ever be directly imaged, a task accomplished with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) in 2019. This telescope works by combining the light-gathering power from several radio telescope across the world, effectively making a telescope as large as the Earth itself!

The black hole is currently swallowing up material and has a ring of highly ionized gas around it (shown in orange in the inset). Sometimes the black hole "burps" and emits a jet of matter. This jet currently measures about 5,000 light years long moving at about 85% the speed of light.

[startswithabang]

Ask Ethan: How Does The Event Horizon Telescope Act Like One Giant Mirror?

“I’m having difficulty understanding why the EHT array is considered as ONE telescope (which has the diameter of the earth). When you consider the EHT as ONE radio telescope, I do understand that the angular resolution is very high due to the wavelength of the incoming signal and earth’s diameter. I also understand that time syncing is critical. But it would help very much to explain why the diameter of the EHT is considered as ONE telescope, considering there are about 10 individual telescopes in the array.”

Humanity has imaged a black hole’s event horizon! It’s been less than a month since the news was announced, and it’s still hard to get over what a phenomenal achievement it was. It’s very difficult to conceive of how, though, we can treat 8 different telescopes and telescope arrays, all stitched together, as acting like a single giant mirror. But that’s exactly what the Event Horizon Telescope did. In fact, that’s what it needed to do, or it would never have been able to achieve the resolutions necessary to construct the first image of a black hole’s event horizon.

But we have it! We achieved it! And here’s the conceptual way you can understand it, even if you barely understand the way a single telescope works.

[vash3r]

BSApricot on Twitter

“Earth-chan tries to take pictures of Black Hole-Sensei and her cousin from Galaxy M87. #BlackHole #EHTBlackHole #RealBlackHole”

(there’s a 2nd image too)

[ray-saint]

Supermassive black hole M87*

Simulation-to-real photo animation by National Science Foundation.

[quasarlasar]

RESPECT THE DARK STAR! RESPECT THE DARK STAR!

I’m someone who’s been following the Event Horizon Telescope since it was first conceived. At one point I even considered joining the project, but my academic life had other plans for me...

The news was great for the first few hours, when it was mostly the scientific community that was discussing it, and I got to skim the papers published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. 

...But then...the internet commentariat descended upon the image, and all was thrown into chaos.

People making endless jokes and memes, dragging politics into the discourse, coming up with their own names for the black hole, arguing over everything like they were experts (when they weren’t)...it was, overwhelming, to say the least. 

As someone who studies supermassive black holes scientifically, it feels absolutely crazy to have your normally niche subject suddenly become dominated by people who duplicate the black hole to make a cat face. 

I just hope that when the dust settles, that people realize this is more than just an image. This is the silhouette of the closest our Universe comes to the Lovecraftian Outer Gods, an indifferent force that creates and destroys on a scale human civilization cannot dream of doing even in a billion years. It is both knowable, with an exterior that decades of blood, sweat, and toil have at last captured; and fundamentally unknowable, its dark heart forever hidden from us behind the veil of a trapped surface. It is one of the simplest objects, only distinguished from others of its kind by mass and spin, and yet also one of the most complex, hiding some of the greatest entropy the Universe has ever known. 

...And Dave chose to photoshop it into someone’s mouth.

To each their own, Dave. To each their own.