Astronomers Have Been Studying the Messier 87 Galaxy for 20 Years. Now, They've Confirmed That Its Supermassive Black Hole Is Spinning

Black holes are as mysterious as they’re fascinating. We know that they have a gravitational pull so strong that not even light can escape and that some of the matter orbiting near their event horizons can be ejected in the form of jets of particles moving at near-light speeds.

But we still have a lot to learn. One major challenge is understanding the dynamics behind these plasma jets. Last year, an international team led by Chinese scientist Yuzhu Cui and involving the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC), Spain, took a significant step forward.

A Black Hole Whose Accretion Disk Rotation Axis Has Changed

The researchers published their findings in Nature after more than 20 years of scientific data collected by the Event Horizon Telescope, an array of ground-based radio telescopes distributed in distinct parts of the world that helped to study the black hole M87 in detail, imaged in April 2019.

The researchers verified that the plasma jet from the black hole oscillates up and down by about 10 degrees. According to the study, this data confirms that M87 rotates and has a precession cycle of about eleven years, as predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

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The data, sifted through a “state-of-the-art theoretical simulation,” suggest that the rotation axis of the black hole’s accretion disk is misaligned with the disk’s spin, giving rise to the dynamics above, a phenomenon we see in the computer-generated image on the article’s cover.

The experts also included in the study a plot of a jet structure with data collected between 2013 and 2018. In the left corner of each image, we can see the period covered, while the white arrows indicate the position of the jet in each subplot.

We now know a little more about supermassive black holes, but as we said, much remains to be discovered. Researchers don’t have precise measurements of M87’s accretion disk structure and spin. The good news is that research continues so we may be surprised again soon.

This article was written by Javier Marquez and originally published in Spanish on Xataka.

Image | IAA-CSIC

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