Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2021

13 MAY-JUNE 2021 ASTRO PUBLISHING energetic jets from its core. “We are now seeing the next crucial piece of evidence to understand how mag- netic fields behave around black holes, and how activity in this very compact region of space can drive powerful jets that extend far be- yond the galaxy,” says Monika Mo ś ? cibrodzka, Coordinator of the EHT Polarimetry Working Group and As- sistant Professor at Radboud Univer- sity in the Netherlands. On 10 April 2019, scientists released the first ever image of a black hole, revealing a bright ring-like structure with a dark central region — the black hole’s shadow. Since then, the EHT collaboration has delved deeper into the data on the supermassive object at the heart of the M87 galaxy collected in 2017. They have discovered that a signifi- M essier 87 (M87) is an enormous elliptical galaxy located about 55 million light years from Earth, vis- ible in the constellation Virgo. At double the mass of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and containing as many as ten times more stars, it is amongst the largest galaxies in the local universe. [ESO] cant fraction of the light around the M87 black hole is polarised. “This work is a major milestone: the polarisation of light carries informa- tion that allows us to better under- stand the physics behind the image we saw in April 2019, which was not possible before,” explains Iván Martí-Vidal, also Coordinator of the EHT Polarimetry Working Group and GenT Distinguished Researcher at the University of Valencia, Spain.