New images of the first black hole we saw have shown us some interesting things. The black hole itself is actually quite stable but there is a wild and dynamic cosmic weather raging outside its event horizon. This even includes its entire magnetic field flipping sometime between 2017 and 2021.
M87* is a supermassive black hole in a galaxy 55 million light-years away with a mass around 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun. The object has been extensively studied.
We have noticed that this black hole has been making something called Jets. Black hole jets are powerful, narrow beams of plasma and radiation that are ejected from the poles of some black holes. “Jets like the one in M87 play a key role in shaping the evolution of their host galaxies,” explains astronomer Eduardo Ros of the Max Planck Institute for Radio astronomy in Germany. This is due to the fact that these Jets spread energy throughout their areas.
The magnetic field of a black hole is thought to be very important in the creation of these Jets. the material that swirls around near a black hole arranges itself into a disk-like shape around the equator. However, not all the material from the disk’s inner rim ends up crossing into oblivion, where it would never be seen again. The theory states that some of the material is diverted along the magnetic field lines that surround the black hole’s event horizon. From there it is accelerated to the poles, and then launched into space at very high speeds, approaching somewhere similar to that of light in a vacuum. The jets then travel through space for up to millions of light years.
The magnetic fields around M87* change significantly, and on very short cosmic timescales, while the black hole itself remains the same. “What’s remarkable is that while the ring size has remained consistent over the years – confirming the black hole’s shadow predicted by Einstein’s theory – the polarization pattern changes significantly,” says astronomer Paul Tiede of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. There are even plans to make a movie about this black hole.
