New images from the James Webb Telescope have captured never-before-seen details of the giant jet ejecting from the famous black hole M87*. This black hole is the first to be directly imaged by the Event Horizon telescope.
New James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics on September 22 also reveal the clearest view yet of a giant counterjet bouncing back through space, study authors found.
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While supermassive black hole jets are somewhat common, “the M87 jet is special in the sense that it is quite close (on an astronomical scale) and very bright across the spectrum,” study co-author Jan Roeder, an astrophysicist at Spain’s Andalucía Institute of Astrophysics, told Live Science in an email. This makes it “an ideal laboratory to study jet physics,” he said.
Black hole M87* is a supermassive black hole with a mass of about 6.5 billion suns. It was the first black hole directly imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope, an array of eight radio telescopes connected around the world, in 2019.
Since then, black holes and their jets have been studied frequently, with recent studies finding that this cosmic monster spins at nearly 80 percent of the universe’s limiting speed, and that the magnetic field around the black hole has changed dramatically in just a few years.
Previous studies have used a variety of electromagnetic wavelengths to observe the jets, including radio waves, visible light, ultraviolet light, X-rays, and gamma rays. But according to Rader, the structure at the infrared scale, which is the key to linking radio and visible light images, was unknown.
Now, Roeder and his team have used thermal images of M87 taken in June 2024 by JWST’s near-infrared camera (NIRCam) to study the jet in an unprecedented way. First, the researchers modeled the galaxy and isolated the jet in the image by removing its emission. So are extra stars, dust, and background galaxies. These cleaned images were then used to identify all of the jet’s individual features at four wavelengths of infrared light.
The two short-wavelength images were particularly high-resolution and captured one of the brightest parts of a jet called HST-1 near the center of the galaxy. Previous work used X-ray data to model HST-1 and found that it consists of two light-emitting regions. These images are the first direct observations confirming this structure, Rader said.
Two longer wavelength images show a faint C-shaped counterjet ejecting from the core in the opposite direction of the main jet. Although the counterjet is visible in radio photographs, the clarity obtained in the infrared images was “very exciting,” Rader said.
Continuing to take pictures at different wavelengths will help scientists understand how the jet interacts with the space environment and what the jet and its counterpart are made of. “Every new observation brings us a little closer to the picture,” Rader added.
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