The Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, famous for capturing the first-ever image of a black hole, has now produced remarkable new views of the powerful engines that fuel cosmic jets. By imaging the turbulent regions around two distant supermassive black holes, researchers have mapped the magnetic fields at the very edge of these behemoths, providing the clearest picture yet of how they launch colossal streams of matter and energy at nearly the speed of light. This work expands the telescope’s mission from imaging the silhouette of black holes to directly investigating the physics of their most dramatic phenomena.
These new observations successfully targeted celestial objects that are fainter and more complex than the EHT’s previous subjects, M87* and Sagittarius A*. The findings offer strong observational evidence for theories explaining how magnetic fields twisted by a black hole’s immense gravity can act as a cosmic slingshot, flinging plasma across galaxies. The ability to resolve these structures, which are unfathomably large yet appear minuscule from Earth, required a virtual telescope the size of our planet and pushed the international collaboration’s imaging techniques to their limits. These results serve as a critical stepping stone, proving the feasibility of imaging these intricate systems and paving the way for future observatories to capture the universe’s most extreme environments in even greater detail.
New Views of Distant Engines
The project’s latest targets were the supermassive black holes at the hearts of two galaxies, NGC 1052 and NGC 1275. The latter hosts the radio source known as 3C 84, or Perseus A, an extremely active black hole located over 200 million light-years away in the Perseus galaxy cluster. The second target, in galaxy NGC 1052, is about 60 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Cetus and is powered by a black hole weighing more than 150 million times the mass of our sun. Both are known for generating enormous twin jets that blast thousands of light-years into intergalactic space.
Imaging these black holes presented unique difficulties. Unlike the relatively clean views of M87*, the central regions of these galaxies are shrouded in thick dust, which optical telescopes cannot penetrate. Furthermore, the targets themselves are significantly fainter than those previously imaged by the EHT collaboration. According to Anne-Kathrin Baczko of Chalmers University of Technology, who led the research on NGC 1052, the target was so faint and complex that the team was initially unsure if they would get any usable data at all. The successful imaging marks a significant technical achievement, demonstrating the EHT’s growing power to probe a wider variety of black hole systems across the universe.
Mapping the Power of Magnetism
A central mystery in modern astrophysics is understanding the precise mechanism that launches relativistic jets from the vicinity of supermassive black holes. While scientists have long believed magnetic fields play a key role, observing them in action has been impossible until now. The EHT provides a unique tool to do so by measuring the polarization of radio waves emitted from the hot, glowing plasma swirling around the black hole. When light is polarized, its waves oscillate in a preferred direction. In this environment, the intense magnetic fields cause charged particles to emit polarized light, allowing astronomers to map the structure and strength of the fields that are otherwise invisible.
The Magnetically Arrested Disk
The observations of 3C 84 provide strong support for a model known as the magnetically arrested disk. In this scenario, as ionized matter falls toward the black hole, it drags powerful magnetic fields along with it. The fields become intensely concentrated near the event horizon, creating a barrier that resists the inward flow of matter. As the disk rotates, these magnetic field lines become increasingly twisted and tangled, storing immense amounts of energy. The theory suggests that a sudden realignment of these fields can trigger a catastrophic release of this stored energy, providing the power needed to launch the observed jets. The new EHT images resolve the region where these jets are born, showing ordered magnetic fields consistent with this model.
Measuring a Distant Field
For the black hole in NGC 1052, the team achieved a direct estimate of the magnetic field’s power near the event horizon. Their analysis revealed a strength of 2.6 tesla, a field approximately 40,000 times stronger than the magnetic field at the surface of the Earth. This measurement provides a concrete value that theorists can use to refine models of jet formation. The researchers also made another key discovery: the region where the jets are generated is similar in size to the now-famous ring of light surrounding the M87* black hole. This suggests that the fundamental scale of these jet-launching engines may be consistent across black holes of different sizes and in different galactic environments.
An Earth-Sized Virtual Telescope
These groundbreaking observations are possible only through the combined power of the Event Horizon Telescope, a global network of radio observatories synchronized to function as a single, Earth-sized dish. This technique, called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), allows astronomers to achieve the extraordinary resolution needed to discern features as small as a donut on the surface of the moon. For the latest campaign, the team used an array of telescopes, including the highly sensitive Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. The sensitivity of ALMA, combined with data from other telescopes, was crucial for detecting the faint radio signals from these challenging targets. By combining petabytes of data collected during a coordinated observing run, researchers can slowly reconstruct an image of the source.
Future Probes of Cosmic Giants
The success in imaging the complex and faint environments around NGC 1052 and 3C 84 demonstrates that the EHT is capable of more than just taking pictures of black hole shadows. It has evolved into a powerful tool for probing the fundamental physics of accretion and outflow. These results are seen as a vital proof of concept for the next generation of radio astronomy projects. The planned next-generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT) will expand the current array with more dishes, providing even higher resolution and sensitivity. Astronomers hope the ngEHT will be powerful enough to move beyond static images and capture the first real-time videos of matter swirling into a black hole. The data also highlights these objects as prime targets for other upcoming facilities, such as the next-generation Very Large Array. With each new observation, scientists move closer to fully understanding how these gravitational behemoths shape the evolution of the galaxies they inhabit.