Chandra Reveals Most Detailed X-Ray View of M87’s Powerful Black Hole Jet

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has snagged the most detailed view yet of that relativistic jet blasting out from M87*, the supermassive black hole, which in 2019 became the very first that was actually photographed. It sits about 55 million light-years off, inside the galaxy Messier 87. This black hole weighs in at roughly 6.5 billion solar masses, and it feeds incoming matter into jets that sprawl for thousands of light-years, though only now the X-ray portion shows it with that almost unreal sharpness.

Inside the Decade-Long Study

This discovery is part of research carried out by Camille Poitras of Université Laval that was presented at the American Astronomical Society’s 248th meeting. Over 13 years of Chandra observations, the researchers used point-spread function deconvolution to improve their resolution to less than 0.1 arcseconds and were able to distinguish features that had previously been indistinguishable, including two separate sources in the knot HST-1. X-rays emanating from the jets decreased to a maximum extent of 84%, indicating synchrotron cooling. The simulations revealed that magnetic fields had a strength measured in hundreds of microgauss.

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Why This Discovery Matters

Team member Gerrit Schellenberger, an astrophysicist from the Center for Astrophysics, highlighted the unique strength of Chandra in studying extreme events on a large time scale, demonstrating the path of energy coming out of the black hole along the jet and into the surroundings. As jets such as the one in M87* represent one of the key ways through which supermassive black holes inject energy into their surroundings, studying their structure provides clues about galactic evolution. Comparison between X-rays and ALMA, JWST, and Hubble observations is useful in investigating particle acceleration inside these highly relativistic jets.