It’s been about a year since the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration released the first image of a black hole. That groundbreaking snapshot featured the supermassive black hole at the center of M87, a massive elliptical galaxy 55 million light-years from Earth.
Now, the EHT Collaboration has released a new image, which shows a jet shooting from the nearly 1-billion-solar-mass black hole 3C 279, located about 5 billion light-years away. The results associated with the image were published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
At the heart of almost every galaxy lies a supermassive black hole. Sometimes those black holes are quiescent, like the one at the center of our Milky Way. But sometimes those black holes are violently active, and 3C 279 is in the latter category. 3C 279 is what astronomers call a blazar — an actively feeding supermassive black hole shooting out a powerful jet very nearly pointed ...
