This article is reproduced from IT House, IT House March 25 news release, according to official Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing time on the evening of 24 March 2021 10:00, has successfully captured the event horizon of human Telescope (EHT) black hole's first-ever photo The cooperative organization provides a new perspective for revealing the M87 supermassive black hole: its image under polarized light (Figure 1).
Figure 1. The image of the M87 supermassive black hole under polarized light. The lines in the picture mark the direction of polarization, which is related to the magnetic field around the shadow of the black hole (Image copyright: EHT Cooperative Organization)
The polarizer only allows polarized light in a specific direction to pass through.
Do you remember the first black hole photo released by EHT in 2019?
Figure 2. The first black hole photo released by EHT in 2019 (Image copyright: EHT Cooperative Organization)
Comparing these two photos, does this new photo look higher in sharpness? Could it be that EHT upgrades the telescope array, like the upgrade of the camera of a mobile phone, to increase the pixel? it's not true. The new photo we saw was actually from the same batch of imaging observations as the first black hole photo, but this "photo" was obtained by processing polarization signals, so we call it "an image of a black hole under polarized light."
On April 10, 2019, scientists released the first ever black hole image, revealing a bright ring structure and its dark central region-the shadow of the black hole. Since then, the EHT partner organization has conducted in-depth research on the supermassive black hole data collected in 2017 at the center of the M87 galaxy. They found that a considerable part of the light around the M87 black hole is polarized.
IT Home learned that this is the first time that astronomers have measured polarization information that characterizes the magnetic field so close to the edge of a black hole. This result is critical to understanding how the M87 galaxy, 55 million light-years away, produces huge jets of energy.