A few years ago, astronomers saw for the first time a patch of cosmic darkness long thought to be unseeable – a black hole, a powerful, elusive beast so dense that not even light can escape its gravity. Black holes are known to gobble up anything and everything that ventures close to them – gas, stars, planets and even fellow black holes. But this fuzzy, doughnut-like black hole in the galaxy Messier 87 is slowly breaking black hole stereotypes. For one, it appears to be giving back to the universe by losing energy. Two months ago, this particular supermassive black hole, roughly 55 million light years from Earth, known as Messier 87*, was studied using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which combines data from multiple radio telescopes worldwide to make a virtual telescope the size of Earth. Observations showed Messier 87* to be spinning, dragging with it its magnetic field and the nearby fabric of space and time.
Earlier this month, astronomers analysing an image of the black hole obtained by the EHT in 2021 found that its magnetic field is strong enough to sometimes prevent it from gobbling up nearby matter. Now, fresh analysis of the image by a subset of that team has revealed that the magnetic field is responsible for also slowing down the rotating black hole, like a spinning top decelerating over time. “We were able to conclusively say the 2021 EHT image shows that energy is flowing out close to the black hole,” Andrew Chael, who is an astrophysicist at Princeton University in New Jersey and lead author of the new study, said. “We need higher sensitivity images to determine 100 per cent if the energy is flowing out from the black hole’s surface itself.”
The energy put out into the depths of space during this self-braking process flows out like “million-light-year-long Jedi lightsabers” via structures called relativistic jets, which stretch up to ten times longer than our Milky Way galaxy, study coauthor Alexandru Lupsasca of Vanderbilt Univer
