First Event Horizon Telescope images of a black hole-powered jet

A powerful jet streaming from a supermassive black hole has been imaged in unprecedented detail by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, including UCL astrophysicist Dr Ziri Younsi, which published the first image of a black hole a year ago. Relativistic jets are highly coherent beams of plasma which are accelerated away from black holes at close to the speed of light. Often larger in extent than the galaxy from which they originate, relativistic jets can transfer vast amounts of energy into the cosmos. In spite of their ubiquity in the Universe, both their physical composition and the process through which they extract energy from black holes is still not well understood. For the new analysis, published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics , a team led by Dr Jae-Young Kim from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, looked down a jet to its central supermassive black hole, observing the structure for the first time and providing valuable insight into how a black hole and its jet are coupled. The team studied the jet from quasar 3C 279 in a galaxy five billion light-years away in the constellation Virgo. A quasar is an extremely bright source of light in the centre of a galaxy, which flickers as massive amounts of gases and stars fall towards the giant black hole inside.