Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2023

12 JULY-AUGUST 2023 ASTRO PUBLISHING close as possible to the black hole.” The new image shows precisely this for the first time: how the base of a jet connects with the matter swirling around a supermassive black hole. The target is the galaxy M87, located 55 million light-years away in our cosmic neighbourhood, and home to a black hole 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun. Previous observations had managed to separately image the region close to the black hole and the jet, but this is the first time both fea- tures have been observed together. “This new image completes the pic- ture by showing the region around the black hole and the jet at the same time,” adds Jae-Young Kim First direct image of a black hole expelling a powerful jet by ESO − Juan Carlos Muñoz Mateos M ost galaxies harbour a su- permassive black hole at their centre. While black holes are known for engulfing mat- ter in their immediate vicinity, they can also launch powerful jets of matter that extend beyond the galaxies that they live in. Under- standing how black holes create such enormous jets has been a long standing problem in astronomy. “We know that jets are ejected from the region surrounding black holes,” says Ru-Sen Lu from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China, “but we still do not fully understand how this actually hap- pens. To study this directly we need to observe the origin of the jet as