A New Look at M87's Black Hole — Now With Its Jet
The team behind the first black hole photo has published a new image showing M87*'s particle jet alongside its event horizon shadow.
Remember that fuzzy orange donut from 2019? The image that made “we photographed a black hole” a real headline instead of science fiction? The same international collaboration behind that picture just published something that, to me, is even more interesting: a new image of the M87 supermassive black hole that captures its jet of high-energy particles alongside the event horizon shadow itself, in the same frame.
If you’ve seen artist renderings of black holes over the years, you’ve probably seen the jets — those improbably long streams of matter and radiation blasting out from the poles at close to the speed of light, sometimes stretching for thousands of light-years. What’s been missing until now is a direct observational link between the jet and the tiny, extreme region right at the black hole’s edge where the jet actually gets launched. This new release connects those two pieces in one picture, which is a big deal for anyone trying to understand the physics of how black holes do this in the first place.
Why the jet matters
The leading theory is that jets are powered by a combination of the black hole’s spin and its surrounding magnetic field — essentially the black hole acts like a natural particle accelerator, flinging material outward instead of letting it all fall in. But theory is cheap; what researchers need is data that shows the geometry and behavior of the region where the jet forms. Having an image that shows both the shadow (created by light bending around the event horizon) and the base of the jet gives scientists a much fuller picture of that launching mechanism than they’ve had before.
It’s worth remembering how hard this kind of imaging actually is. M87* is roughly 55 million light-years away, and resolving detail at that distance requires an Earth-sized virtual telescope — which is exactly what the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration built by linking observatories across the globe and combining their data. Pulling a coherent image out of that dataset is a monumental computational and engineering effort, and doing it well enough to show both the shadow and the jet in one frame is a step up in difficulty from the 2019 image alone.
There’s also a broader significance here beyond M87 itself. Jets like this one are thought to play a role in shaping entire galaxies — regulating star formation, redistributing energy across vast distances, and generally acting as one of the more dramatic ways a black hole can influence its surroundings far beyond its immediate gravitational pull. Understanding exactly how the jet connects to the black hole’s immediate environment is a piece of the puzzle for understanding galactic evolution more broadly.
I’ll be curious to see how this new image gets used going forward — whether it helps refine the simulations of jet formation that astrophysicists have been building for years, and whether it points toward similar imaging efforts for other black holes with jets, like the one in our own galaxy’s neighbor, Centaurus A. Either way, it’s a good reminder that the 2019 image wasn’t the end of the story for the Event Horizon Telescope project — it was the opening act.