Astronomers today unveiled new images of the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy, showing both a fluffier version of the black hole's glowing ring and its powerful jet together in the same image for the first time. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) first imaged the black hole in 2017; this new image is based on data collected by the Global Millimeter VLBI Array (GMVA), which captured radio emissions in a slightly different but scientifically significant wavelength. The details of the new observational data, image processing methods, and associated computer simulations are described in a new paper published in the journal Nature.

“This is the first image where we are able to pin down where the ring is relative to the powerful jet escaping out of the central black hole,” said co-author Kazunori Akiyama of MIT’s Haystack Observatory, who developed the imaging software used to visualize the black hole. “Now we can start to address questions such as how particles are accelerated and heated and many other mysteries around the black hole more deeply.”

As we've reported previously, the EHT is actually a collection of telescopes scattered around the globe, including hardware from Hawaii to Europe and from the South Pole to Greenland. The "telescope" is created by a process called interferometry, which uses light captured at different locations to build an image with a resolution that is the equivalent of a giant telescope (a telescope so big, it’s as if it were as large as the distance between the most distant locations of the individual telescopes).

Scientists working on the EHT made global headlines in 2019 when they unveiled the first direct image of the back hole at the center of the M87 galaxy. Two years later, EHT researchers released a new image of the same black hole, this time showing how it looked in polarized light. The ability to measure that polarization for the first time—a signature of magnetic fields at the black hole's edge—yielded fresh insight into how black holes gobble up matter and emit powerful jets from their cores. Astronomers were also able to map the magnetic field lines at the inner edge and study the interaction between matter flowing in and being blown outward.

And earlier this month, four members of the EHT collaboration applied a new machine-learning technique, dubbed PRIMO (principal-component interferometric modeling), to the original 2017 data, giving that famous image its first makeover. PRIMO analyzed over 30,000 simulated images of black holes accreting gas, taking into account many different models for how this accretion of matter occurs. Structural patterns were sorted by how frequently they showed up in the simulations, and PRIMO then blended them to produce a new, high-fidelity image of the black hole.