An image from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) showed for the first time that a distant black hole is spewing material particles into the universe. The supermassive black hole is located five billion light-years from Earth and sits at the heart of the quasar.
The quasar is the bright heart of the galaxy, where the black hole and its accretion disk (the gas and dust surrounding the black hole) generate massive amounts of energy. The friction created by these accretion discs, when pushed by an extreme gravitational force of incredible power, is so great that it can generate enormous amounts of energy.
Thus, some materials are sucked into the black hole while others are thrown into space. Thanks to pure energy, these materials are thrown into the Universe at the speed of light 99.5%, which is 299,792,458 meters per second.
The EHT (International Astronomers' Cooperation) study produced a series of images of a quasar known as 3C 279, which helped create a video of the black hole's spectacular activity.
To capture the images, the researchers used a technique called very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), which synchronizes and links radios around the world. Here's what the EHT astronomers report says:
“The EHT is capable of observing objects as small as 20 microseconds in the sky, like looking at an orange on the moon from Earth.”
Jae-Young Kim, MPIfR researcher and lead author of a new article, is enthusiastic and puzzled at the same time:
“We knew that every time you open a new window into the universe, you might find something new. Here is where we expected to find the area in which the jet is formed. However, having received the clearest possible image, we find a kind of perpendicular structure. It's like finding a completely different shape by opening the smallest matryoshka. '
“What used to be a single 'core' of radio communications is now divided into two independent complexes. And they are moving – even on such scales as light months, the jet in 3C 279 is flying towards us at over 99.5% light speed! '
