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<ul class="summary-list"><li>A new report shows what jobs are typically held by asset-limited, income-constrained, but employed Americans.</li><li>Nearly a quarter of US nonprofit workers live just above the federal poverty line.</li></ul>Many of America's <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-calling-out-non-profit-low-pay-exploitation-2022-8">nonprofit employees</a> fill gaps in the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-capitalism-socialism-economy-jobs-social-security-unemployment-2024-2">social safety net</a>, helping people <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/half-of-nyc-residents-cant-afford-housing-food-healthcare-report-2023-4">access housing</a>, food, and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-millennials-giving-up-medical-care-cant-afford-costs-2024-2">healthcare</a> where government programs fail.But a chunk of these workers are <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/middle-class-americans-earning-above-poverty-live-paycheck-to-paycheck-2024-4">barely getting by themselves</a>. A report published in September by the policy and research firm United for ALICE found that 3 million US nonprofit employees — nearly a quarter of the total nonprofit workforce — are living just above the federal poverty line. The report examined Americans who have identified as nonprofit workers on the Census' American Community Survey, including many employees in healthcare, educational services, and social assistance.The <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-typical-alice-middle-class-poverty-housing-food-benefits-2024-4">ALICE demographic</a> is people who are asset-limited, income-constrained, and employed. The ALICE threshold varies based on local cost of living and household size. If an individual lives above the federal poverty line but can't afford survival necessities — like housing, food, and healthcare — where they live, they are considered ALICE. This might be $702 a month for a parent and school-age child in El Paso, Texas, or $2,158 a month for a parent and school-age child in Alexandria, Virginia.The cohort's financial experience is <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/alice-living-paycheck-to-paycheck-without-government-assistance-snap-medicaid-2024-5">marked by a catch-22</a> — their household income is often too high to get help but too low to comfortably afford daily life.Lisa Kelley, for example, lives paycheck to paycheck in Cincinnati. Often, the 47-year-old feels like she's "doing everything right" and is still <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/government-assistance-food-stamps-snap-doesnt-help-low-income-dinks-2024-5">unable to access</a> the assistance she needs."There's no help," she <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/rent-healthcare-plasma-gen-x-government-assistance-2024-5">previously told BI</a>. "If you make too much, there's no help; if you are healthy, there's no help; if you don't have kids, there's no help."<h2 id="1051b53b-ec29-4b34-a6e5-059d162766d3">Nonprofit workers provide help, but they're also struggling</h2>About 13% of Americans live at or below the federal poverty threshold, meaning their annual household income is below $15,060 for one person or $31,200 for a family of four. Access to many assistance programs, like SNAP, Medicaid, and housing vouchers, is based on this measure, which <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/poverty-line-leaves-behind-low-income-americans-snap-medicare-wic-2024-6">largely hasn't been updated</a> since the 1960s. This measure was calculated when Americans spent about a third of their paycheck on food, whereas Americans now spend only 13% of their income on groceries.<a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/alice-living-paycheck-to-paycheck-without-government-assistance-snap-medicaid-2024-5">ALICEs</a>, however, make up another 29% of Americans who <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/retirement-savings-social-security-baby-boomers-without-savings-401k-poverty-2024-8">feel like they are living in poverty</a> but are out of reach of these resources because their paychecks are slightly too high. This leaves some choosing between putting food on the table, paying bills, or going to necessary doctor's visits. It's led some to take extra part-time jobs or rely on gig work — especially if they live in a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-food-healthcare-housing-cost-most-expensive-us-cities-2024-2">high-cost-of-living area</a>."We need help, especially those of us that are trying to go to work every day," Cherie Tobias, a 48-year-old Applebees server in Michigan who lives on $25,000 a year, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/middle-class-americans-earning-above-poverty-struggles-afford-food-medicine-2024-4">previously told BI</a>. "No matter how we feel, no matter how much pain we're in, we're going to try to push through to provide — but we go home defeated."Younger nonprofit workers are particularly struggling. According to the report, 37% of nonprofit workers under the age of 25 fall into the ALICE category. This follows larger ALICE trends, which show that workers under 25 are one of the main cohorts living out of reach of most assistance programs. Similarly, 23% of nonprofit workers ages 25 to 44 are considered ALICEs.<a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/alabama-basic-income-single-mothers-afford-childcare-bills-birmingham-2024-8">Single parents</a> working for nonprofits are also facing grim prospects: According to the report, over half are living below the ALICE threshold. And, while 16% of white nonprofit workers were below the ALICE threshold, 35% of Black workers in the sector were struggling to make ends meet.It's an irony that addresses some of the larger struggles ALICE workers face in the US: Many of the larger support structures do not see them as in need, which exacerbates the need further. Without adequate income or access to resources, these Americans are stuck in the middle."I'm not homeless enough to get certain help because I have a roof over my head," Melissa Hedden, 41, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/not-poor-enough-low-income-millennial-cant-afford-rent-homeless-2024-5">previously told BI</a>. "But I'm too homeless to get a job because I don't know where I'm going to live in three weeks. What do you do?"Are you an ALICE or nonprofit employee struggling to afford daily life? Are you open to sharing your story? If so, reach out to <a target="_blank" href="mailto:allisonkelly@businessinsider.com">allisonkelly@businessinsider.com</a>, <a target="_blank" href="mailto:nsheidlower@businessinsider.com">nsheidlower@businessinsider.com</a>, and <a target="_blank" href="mailto:jkaplan@businessinsider.com">jkaplan@businessinsider.com</a>.

Nonprofit workers fill holes in the social safety net, but millions are financially insecure themselves

Sydney, Scientists have for the first time observed the early universe running in extreme slow motion, unlocking one of the mysteries of physicist Albert Einstein's expanding universe. Einstein's general theory of relativity means that we should observe the distant -- and hence ancient -- universe running much slower than the present day. However, peering back that far in time has proven elusive. Scientists have now cracked that mystery by using quasars as 'clocks'. Quasars are the supermassive <keyword id="4740034" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="black-holes" source="Orion">black holes</keyword> at the centres of early galaxies. "Looking back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing to flow five times slower," said lead author Professor Geraint Lewis from the School of Physics and Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney. "If you were there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second -- but from our position, more than 12 billion years into the future, that early time appears to drag," he said. In the research published in the journal Nature Astronomy, Lewis and his collaborator, Dr Brendon Brewer from the University of Auckland, used observed data from nearly 200 quasars to analyse this time dilation. "Thanks to Einstein, we know that time and space are intertwined and, since the dawn of time in the singularity of the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding," Lewis said. "This expansion of space means that our observations of the early universe should appear to be much slower than time flows today. "In this paper, we have established that back to about a billion years after the Big Bang." Previously, astronomers have confirmed this slow-motion universe back to about half the age of the universe using supernovae -- massive exploding stars -- as 'standard clocks'. But while supernovae are exceedingly bright, they are difficult to observe at the immense distances needed to peer into the early universe. By observing quasars, this time horizon has been rolled back to just a tenth the age of the universe, confirming that the universe appears to speed up as it ages.

After the Big Bang, universe is running 5x  slower: Scientists crack the mystery using supermassive black holes

<ul class="summary-list"><li>A new photo of the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/watch-scientists-big-reveal-maybe-photo-milky-way-black-hole-2022-5">supermassive black hole at our galaxy's core</a> looks different from those before.</li><li>A groundbreaking collaboration of black-hole-imaging scientists published it on Wednesday.</li></ul>The supermassive black hole at the heart of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/vanishing-radio-signals-mystery-objects-in-milky-way-galaxy-center-2022-1">our galaxy</a> has a side you've never seen before.A new image shows <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/photo-black-hole-magnetic-field-event-horizon-telescope-2021-3">powerful magnetic fields</a> swirling around our hometown black hole called Sagittarius A*, pronounced "A-star."The image is the latest innovation of a groundbreaking scientific collaboration called the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/event-horizon-telescope-black-hole-snaps-first-image-messier-87-2019-4">Event Horizon Telescope</a>, or EHT, which rallied telescopes across the planet to focus on one black hole together, effectively creating an observatory as big as Earth.Five years ago, the EHT released <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/supermassive-black-hole-first-photo-event-horizon-telescope-m87-2019-4">the first-ever photo of a supermassive black hole</a>, a feat thought to be impossible for decades because black holes are objects so dense that not even light can escape them, making them invisible.But the disc of ultra-hot material circling a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/listen-nasa-reveals-black-hole-sounds-spooky-audio-2022-8">black hole</a>, which you can see in the image below of a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy called Messier 87, is visible.<div type="image" title="first image of a black hole m87" height="1515" width="2600" msid="108827869" hostid="261"></div>Not long after that, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/first-image-reveals-black-hole-at-milky-way-galaxy-center-2022-5">Sagittarius A*</a> got its moment in the limelight.Sagittarius A*'s 2022 portrait, below, looked quite similar to Messier 87's, even though Sagittarius A* is about 1,000 times smaller than Messier 87's black hole.<div type="image" title="black hole photo orange ring sagitarrius A*" height="2000" width="2000" msid="108827870" hostid="261"></div>But the new image released on Wednesday is different. It shows our galaxy's black hole in polarized light, which occurs when <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/colliding-black-holes-produce-light-astronomers-flare-first-time-2020-6">light waves</a> oscillate in a preferred direction.The new view below reveals a clear polarization pattern in the particles circling the black hole — which means powerful magnetic fields spiraling around the edge of Sagittarius A* affect them."What we're seeing now is that there are strong, twisted, and organized magnetic fields near the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy," Sara Issaoun, an astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the co-lead of the project, said in a press release.<h2>A clue about the secret structure of supermassive black holes</h2>Sagittarius A* is about 27,000 light-years away from Earth, so this image represents a very tiny point in the sky."This appears the same size in the sky as a donut on the moon," Issaoun said at a press conference presenting the first image of it in 2022.But the discovery of the magnetic-field lines offers a major clue about the behavior of supermassive black holes across the universe and how they eat the material surrounding them.The EHT had previously imaged its first black hole, Messier 87, in polarized light, though it doesn't look quite as striking.<div type="image" title="black hole image shows a glowing red disk with its lower half bright yellow full of streaks arcing outward" height="650" width="644" msid="108827872" hostid="261"></div>Since both black holes have similar magnetic-field structures despite their immense size difference, the EHT scientists now suspect that all supermassive black holes might have magnetic structures like this."We've learned that strong and ordered magnetic fields are critical to how black holes interact with the gas and matter around them," Issaoun said.The discovery also suggests that, like Messier 87, Sagittarius A* could have a jet of radiation and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/black-hole-accelerators-cosmic-rays-rain-down-speed-of-light-2024-1">high-speed particles</a> shooting out of the black hole. We just can't see it yet.<div type="image" title="An artist's impression shows a jet of matter spewing from a black hole." height="2160" width="3840" msid="108827873" hostid="261"></div>The telescope observations that led to this new image took place in 2017, but the EHT is poised to cast its gaze at Sagittarius A* again in April.Issaoun and her collaborators published their findings in two papers in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on Wednesday.<h2>Bigger black-hole breakthroughs may be in store</h2>Further imaging with new innovative techniques and technologies could reveal even more secrets of supermassive black holes, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/black-hole-how-big-largest-universe-2019-5">both big and small</a>.The EHT aims to capture <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/video-black-hole-milky-way-center-2019-10">video of our galaxy's black hole</a>, possibly by the end of the decade, Michael Johnson, an astrophysicist on the project, told Business Insider at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in January."We think we're just scratching the surface of what can be done," Johnson said in a presentation at that meeting. "Even more exciting science is yet to come."To that end, the EHT recently added a telescope in Greenland to its worldwide array.Incorporating satellites into that array, thereby expanding the EHT observatory into space, could allow scientists to study dozens of black holes instead of just two. Johnson said that's likely to happen within a decade.

This new photo of a supermassive black hole is unlike any before, showing powerful magnetic fields spiraling around it

<ul class="summary-list"><li>NASA's JWST telescope spotted a bizarre galaxy that defies expectations. </li><li>Galaxy UHZ-1 formed around a huge black hole that existed surprisingly soon after the Big Bang.</li></ul>A bizarre galaxy spotted in the early days of the universe could rewrite how <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/black-holes-can-lose-energy-study-finds-m87-2023-11">supermassive black holes</a> are formed.Scientists have long wondered how supermassive black holes — the enormous, mysterious phenomena at the center of galaxies including our Milky Way — came into existence.A new observation of Galaxy UHZ-1, collected by NASA using its powerful new <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/james-webb-space-telescope-discovers-smallest-brown-dwarf-2023-12">James Webb Space Telescope</a> and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, suggests an unusual origin.Per the agency, it could show that the supermassive black hole there was born directly from clouds of primordial gas.If confirmed, it would show, for the first time, that supermassive black holes are not always formed by dying stars.Such a discovery "changes the game in understanding how these objects formed," said study lead author Priyamvada Natarajan <a target="_blank" href="https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/black-hole-discovery/">while speaking to Science Friday</a>, a non-profit science-education organization."It is simply too big too early. It's like looking in at a kindergarten classroom and there among all the 5-year-olds is one that is 150 pounds and/or six feet tall," Daniel Holz, a theorist at the University of Chicago who studies black holes, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/24/science/space/astronomy-black-holes.html">told The New York Times</a>."Priya has found an extremely exciting black hole, if true," he said.Chandra X-ray Observatory first picked up the black hole by detecting X-rays let off by galaxy UHZ-1.The black hole inside, the observatory found, was a beast — estimated between 10 million and 100 million times as massive as the sun, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2402016-astronomers-have-found-the-most-distant-black-hole-ever-confirmed/">per New Scientist</a>.When JWST set out to figure out where the black hole was located, scientists got a shock: it was inside UHZ-1 about 13.2 billion light years away.The distance meant that this behemoth existed when the universe was very young, only about 470 million years after the Big Bang. It's the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-black-hole-james-webb-space-telescope-discovery-early-universe-2023-11">furthest-flung black hole ever recorded</a>.And that's puzzling. One theory for the formation of supermassive black holes is that they come to be over a long time, The Times reported.Stars at the beginning of the universe were small: they burned what was available, hydrogen and helium, which means they flamed out quickly, leaving smaller black holes about 10 to 100 times bigger than the sun in their wake, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nasa.gov/missions/chandra/nasa-telescopes-discover-record-breaking-black-hole/">per a press release from NASA</a>.Over time, per this theory, black holes would merge, eventually forming supermassive black holes.But UHZ-1 provides "compelling evidence" for another theory, said study author Natarajan, who is a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale.Per this theory, black holes could be born big from the get-go. This type of galaxy, a big black hole surrounded by a small cloud of gas, could provide a heavy "seed" of a black hole that could grow into a supermassive black hole on its own.Natarajan and her colleagues have dubbed this type of cluster "overmassive black hole galaxies."The supermassive black holes, then, wouldn't be born from early stars. The best explanation instead, per Natarajan, is that they came from cosmic gas collapsing in on itself, creating seeds already weighing between about 10,000 and 100,000 suns."The fact that these start out in life overmassive implies that they will likely eventually evolve into supermassive black holes," said Natarajan, speaking to The Times."Nature does seem to make BH seeds many ways, beyond just stellar death!" she said, per the Times.To confirm their theory, scientists will need more evidence, said Fabio Pacucci at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, per New Scientist. "If this is at a 100 million solar masses it's pretty big, but if it's at 10 million solar masses it's not that big, so it could have possibly formed from a lighter seed," he said."Everything hinges on finding more of these objects, possibly more massive, possibly at even higher distances, to really understand how the first population of black holes formed."The findings were published in a peer-reviewed study in the <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://affiliate.insider.com?h=ff418302a659d6b07cc975f5a9d7b724d6f9dc51cc04519b80294a719b8f802e&amp;postID=658befea8aa21447965669b2&amp;postSlug=strange-galaxy-spotted-nasa-may-rewrite-theory-black-holes-2023-12&amp;site=bi&amp;u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nature.com%2Farticles%2Fs41550-023-02111-9">journal Nature Astronomy</a> on November 6.

A bizarre galaxy NASA spotted at the edge of the universe could upend what we know about supermassive black holes      

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Stephen Hawking famously predicted in 1974 that black holes die by evaporation.</li><li>But experts thought the extreme gravitational environments of black holes were unique to his theory.</li></ul>The ultimate <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-and-when-our-universe-will-end-2017-8">fate of our universe</a> is unknown. But that doesn't stop astronomers from trying to figure it out.The most recent idea of how our universe might end is that it will simply evaporate. That's right, everything will evaporate, a new <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18521" target="_blank" rel="noopener">study</a> published in the journal Physical Review Letters suggests.The scientists from Radboud University were examining Stephen Hawking's theory of how black holes die by a phenomenon now famously known as Hawking radiation, which the theoretical physicist predicted in 1974.According to quantum physics theory and Einstein's theory of gravity, particles spontaneously form and annihilate under the intense gravitational environment located at the mouths of black holes, aka the event horizon.Hawking calculated that sometimes these particles are trapped behind the event horizon, but others <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/stephen-hawking-says-escape-from-a-black-hole-is-possible-kind-of-2016-6">escape to the outside</a> in the form of Hawking radiation. Over time, enough particles escape that the entire <a href="https://www.astronomy.com/science/the-beginning-to-the-end-of-the-universe-how-black-holes-die/">black hole evaporates</a>.Hawking radiation <a href="https://www.astronomy.com/science/black-holes-can-still-shine-a-bright-light-astronomers-say/">has been observed around a black hole</a> in our universe, confirming the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/has-stephen-hawking-died">late genius's</a> predictions. And up to this point, black holes were the only places experts had looked for it.But this new study may change that."Objects without an event horizon, such as the remnants of dead stars and other large objects in the universe, also have this sort of radiation," study author Heino Falcke said in a <a href="https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/991116" target="_blank" rel="noopener">statement</a> on Friday. "And, after a very long period, that would lead to everything in the universe eventually evaporating, just like black holes."In the study, the scientists propose that you don't necessarily need extreme gravitational environments for Hawking radiation to exist.Rather, anything with mass that warps the fabric of spacetime could trigger this radiation."We show that far beyond a black hole the curvature of spacetime plays a big role in creating radiation," study co-author Walter van Suijlekom said in the statement.The scientists' calculations will need further analysis and testing as well as observational proof to confirm their predictions.If their theory holds true, though, there's nothing to worry about in the near future.It takes black holes <a href="https://www.astronomy.com/science/the-beginning-to-the-end-of-the-universe-how-black-holes-die/">longer than the age of the universe</a> to evaporate, researchers have estimated. While it's unclear how long it would take something like a star to do the same, chances are our universe will remain intact for the foreseeable future.

Stephen Hawking's famous theory of how black holes die could mean our entire universe is doomed to evaporate, a new study found

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Black holes have been spotted spitting up remnants of stars years after gobbling them up. </li><li>The finding is confusing astronomers, as it doesn't fit with what we know about black holes. </li></ul>Black holes can burp up remnants of <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/astronomers-capture-a-black-hole-shredding-star-into-spaghetti-strands-2020-10">stars </a>years after destroying them, and no one knows why, a study has found. Astronomers have long known that black holes can spew out a bright flash of energy after tearing apart an unfortunate star — this is called a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/cosmic-explosion-100-times-size-of-solar-system-largest-ever-2023-5">tidal disruption event</a> (TDE).However, the expectation has been that such jets would be seen within months of the original TDE.The new study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, found that 10 out of 24 <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/james-webb-space-telescope-spots-most-distant-supermassive-black-hole-2023-7">black holes</a> observed started spewing matter between two to six years after the TDE. The finding, which has been puzzling astronomers, could mean we've misunderstood what happens when black holes eat up a star, Yvette Cendes, a lead author on the research from the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in <a href="https://twitter.com/whereisyvette/status/1696592529670701302?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a thread on X</a>, formerly Twitter."The real short answer to what's causing this is 'we don't really know, but no one was predicting it,'" she said.<h2>No one saw this coming because no one was looking</h2>There's a good reason why we'd never seen this before: no one expected it to happen. A TDE happens when a star gets too close to a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ultramassive-black-hole-33-billion-times-bigger-than-sun-durham-2023-3">supermassive black hole</a>. Within a few hours, the star is shredded to bits.At this point, astronomers typically think about half of the matter of the star will start swirling around the black hole, creating what is called the "<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/huge-cosmic-burst-two-circling-black-holes-study-2023-6">accretion disk</a>." The theory is then that the other half of the matter will be spewed out in a one-time jet of energy, which can be picked up from Earth.<div type="image" title="black hole event horizon shadow accretion disk spiraling illustration eso1644b" height="2121" width="2828" msid="103395506" hostid="261" sizebytes="65520"></div>Astronomers expect that flash of light to happen within a few weeks or months of the TDE. If nothing is picked up within that time, they turn their telescopes elsewhere."Radio telescope time is precious! And why look YEARS after the explosive event for something you didn't see right after said explosive event?" said Cendes on X.But this view started to change in 2022, when Cendes and her co-workers spotted a black hole that woke up again two years after swallowing a star. Since then, the collaborators have been turning their instruments to monitor 24 black holes for years on end. They've found that more than half of them woke up again years after the original star-swallowing event. One black hole seemed to turn back <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Andromeda321/comments/164n35e/i_have_discovered_that_up_to_half_of_all_black/">six years later</a>."If you know anything about physics, you know this time scale doesn't make sense!" Cendes said in a post on Reddit. In another two of the cases, Cendes noticed the black holes peaking, then fading, then <a href="https://www.livescience.com/space/black-holes/up-to-half-of-black-holes-that-rip-apart-stars-burp-back-up-stellar-remains-years-later">turning on again</a>."That's completely new and unexpected," Cendes told Live Science. "People were thinking that you'd have one outflow, and then it's kind of done," she said. <h2>Everything we know about accretion disks may be wrong</h2>The findings could mean we need to rethink how black holes swallow up stars, Cendes said.At this point, what we know is what is not happening.Cendes has ruled out that this could be due to a second TDE, or that the jet started straight after the TDE, but was directed away from Earth at first. She's also ruled out some of the more fanciful explanations, such as the jet being delayed because the black hole was messing with time in the area. What that leaves us with, however, is a big mystery. "Our best guess is 'everything we assumed about accretion disc formation in TDEs is wrong''" Cendres said on X. "What if the optical flash is NOT a disc forming, but streams of material interacting, and the disc doesn't form until YEARS later? We don't know the full details but def possible," she said. The new findings suggest astronomers will have to rethink the relationship between stars and black holes."I've had great fun getting looks of incomprehension from theorists over recent months, believe you me!" Cendes said on X.The findings were published on <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.13595">pre-print server arXiv</a> on August 25.

Black holes mysteriously burp up fragments of stars they destroyed years earlier, and scientists have no idea why

The most extreme objects in the universe are black holes, which are so densely packed into such little space that nothing, not even light, can evade their gravitational attraction once it is sufficiently close to it. Understanding black holes is the key to unravelling the most fundamental laws governing the cosmos because they represent the limits of two of the best-tested theories of physics: the theory of general relativity, which describes gravity as resulting from the (large-scale) warping of space-time by massive objects, and the theory of <keyword id="867567" type="General" weightage="80" keywordseo="quantum-mechanics" source="Orion">quantum mechanics</keyword>, which describes physics at the smallest length scales. To fully describe black holes, these two theories need to be stitched together to form a theory of quantum gravity. Radiating black holes To achieve this goal, we might want to look at what manages to escape from black holes, rather than what gets swallowed. The event horizon is an intangible boundary around each black hole, beyond which there is no way of getting out. However, <keyword id="61369" type="General" weightage="80" keywordseo="stephen-hawking" source="Orion">Stephen Hawking</keyword> famously discovered that every black hole must emit a small amount of thermal radiation due to small quantum fluctuations around its horizon. Unfortunately, this radiation has never been directly detected. The amount of Hawking radiation coming from each black hole is predicted to be so small, it is impossible to detect (with current technology) among the radiation coming from all other cosmic objects. Alternatively, could we study the mechanism underlying the emergence of Hawking radiation right here on <keyword id="6359982" type="General" weightage="50" keywordseo="earth" source="Orion">Earth</keyword>? This is what researchers from the <keyword id="170316" type="General" weightage="80" keywordseo="university-of-amsterdam" source="Orion">University of Amsterdam</keyword> and IFW Dresden set out to investigate. And the answer is an exciting "yes". Black holes in the lab "We wanted to use the powerful tools of condensed matter physics to probe the unattainable physics of these incredible objects: black holes," says author <keyword id="15504661" type="General" weightage="80" keywordseo="lotte-mertens" source="Orion">Lotte Mertens</keyword>. To do so, the researchers studied a model based on a one-dimensional chain of atoms, in which electrons can "hop" from one atomic site to the next. The warping of spacetime due to the presence of a black hole is mimicked by tuning how easily electrons can hop between each site. With the right variation of hopping probability along the chain, an electron moving from one end of the chain to the other will behave exactly like a piece of matter approaching the horizon of a black hole. And, analogous to Hawking radiation, the model system has measurable thermal excitations in the presence of a synthetic horizon. Learning by analogy Despite the lack of actual gravity in the model system, considering this synthetic horizon gives important insight into the physics of black holes. For instance, the fact that the simulated Hawking radiation is thermal (meaning the system appears to have a fixed temperature) only for a specific choice of spatial variation of the hopping probability, suggests that real Hawking radiation may also only be purely thermal in certain situations. Additionally, the Hawking radiation only occurs when the model system starts out without any spatial variation of hopping probabilities, mimicking flat spacetime without any horizon, before being changed into one hosting a synthetic black hole. The emergence of Hawking radiation therefore requires a change in the warping of spacetime, or a change in how an observer looking for the radiation is perceiving this warping. Finally, Hawking radiation requires some part of the chain to exist beyond the synthetic horizon. This means that the existence of thermal radiation is intricately connected to the quantum-mechanical property of entanglement between objects on either side of the horizon. Because the model is so simple, it can be implemented in a range of experimental setups. This could include tuneable electronic systems, spin chains, ultracold atoms or optical experiments. Bringing black holes to the lab can bring us one step closer to understanding the interplay between gravity and quantum mechanics, and on our way to a theory of quantum gravity.

Research suggests synthetic black holes radiate like real ones

<ul class="summary-list"><li>A new image <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/watch-scientists-big-reveal-maybe-photo-milky-way-black-hole-2022-5">reveals</a> the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/photo-black-hole-magnetic-field-event-horizon-telescope-2021-3">supermassive black hole</a> at the center of the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/vanishing-radio-signals-mystery-objects-in-milky-way-galaxy-center-2022-1">Milky Way</a> for the first time.</li><li>In 2019, the <keyword id="13903419" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="event-horizon-telescope" source="Orion">Event Horizon Telescope</keyword> captured the first-ever image of a supermassive <keyword id="13903417" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="black-hole" source="Orion">black hole</keyword>.</li></ul>For the first time, take a good look at the supermassive black hole churning at the center of our galaxy.Hundreds of scientists worked together to capture the first-ever image of the Milky Way's central black hole, called Sagittarius A* (pronounced "A-star"). Research institutions across the planet unveiled the picture in simultaneous press conferences on Thursday.In the photo, a brilliant fuzzy ring of orange and yellow glows around a dark center — the accretion disk, a swirl of superheated material, circling the event horizon, where not even light can escape the black hole's gravity. That disk allows scientists to capture the black hole's silhouette, since the object swallows all forms of light, making it impossible to photograph directly.Researchers took this stunning photo through the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an international collaboration that involves 300 international scientists and eight radio observatories around the world. Xavier Barcons, director general of the European Southern Observatory, said at a press conference that the groundbreaking result is a timely reminder of what we can achieve when countries work together.Sara Issaoun of Harvard, an EHT collaborator, said that researchers gathered direct evidence that Sagittarius A* is a black hole, with a size of about 52 microarcseconds in the sky."This appears the same size in the sky as a donut on the Moon," she said at a press conference.In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope captured the first-ever image of a supermassive black hole located 53.5 million light-years away. That picture showed a supermassive black hole at the center of another galaxy called Messier 87, or M87, more than 50 million light-years away. To achieve the photographic feat, the researchers linked telescopes across the planet to focus on the same object all together, creating a virtual observatory the size of Earth.<div type="image" title="first image of a black hole m87" height="1515" width="2020" msid="91521146" hostid="261"></div>For many EHT scientists, the next step was obvious: turn this groundbreaking cosmic lens to the heart of the Milky Way."We were all amazed that the image of Sagittarius A* looked so similar to the image of the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy," Sera Markoff, co-chair of the EHT <keyword id="11896083" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="science" source="Orion">Science</keyword> Council and astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam, told reporters on Thursday. "This tells us that general relativity governs these objects up close, and any differences we see further away must be due to differences in the material that surrounds the black holes," Markoff said.Scientists think every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, from the very early days of the galaxy's birth. A major astronomical mystery is how black holes and their <keyword id="12393175" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="galaxies" source="Orion">galaxies</keyword> evolve together."Understanding black holes, at any level, addresses fundamental mysteries of the universe. If we're ever going to learn something that is completely unknown to us, it will be from doing something like studying black holes," Shep Doeleman, an astrophysicist at Harvard University and founding director of the EHT collaboration, told Insider ahead of Thursday's announcement."It's a wonderful time to be alive," he added.<h2>'Seeing is believing'</h2>Previous Nobel Prize-winning research has demonstrated that the supermassive compact object at the center of the Milky Way must be a black hole, based on the way that its gravity affects nearby stars. Doeleman compared that research to finding bones with teeth marks on the jungle floor and concluding there is a large predator in the area."Contrast that with taking a camera out and taking a snapshot of a lion," he said, adding, "Seeing is believing, in a certain sense."Sagittarius A* possesses the mass of 4 million suns, creating one of the most powerful gravitational forces in the universe, devouring the matter that falls into its event horizon. There's nothing to fear, though. It's about 27,000 light-years from Earth.<div type="image" title="Sagittarius A" height="565" width="754" msid="91521148" hostid="261"></div>Even though it's closer to us, this black hole was much more difficult to image than M87. It's 1,000 times less massive than M87, which means the accretion disk orbits multiple times in just a few hours."During one night of observing, it's constantly shapeshifting. So it's very difficult to combine all the observations from a single night and to make a still image. It's like having somebody move around while you're keeping the shutter open on your camera. Everything gets very blurry," Doeleman said.Though it's hard to capture, that speed makes Sagittarius A* ideal for studying the dynamics of black holes and how they evolve over time. It could take months of observing M87 to see the flares and feeding activities that occur on Sagittarius A* in just one week.The new image of the behemoth at the center of our galaxy could hint at even more exciting discoveries to come.<h2>Working toward video of the Milky Way's black hole</h2>These images are opening a new field of black-hole studies, and it doesn't stop with still pictures. EHT has branched out into a second project, called next-generation EHT (ngEHT), to make the first videos of black holes.The group is working to add more telescopes to its network and leverage new computer technology to process 10 times more data from those telescopes, Doeleman <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/video-black-hole-milky-way-center-2019-10">told Insider in 2019</a>. In doing so, he said, they could capture video of both Sagittarius A* and their original photo subject, M87, in about five years.Now, two years in, EHT has 11 telescopes in its network, from Chile to Greenland to France to the South Pole. Doeleman said this week that the collaboration still has to double its telescope fleet. He hopes that eventually, videos can reveal what a still image cannot: how those black holes devour matter, how they launch X-ray jets from their poles, and how matter orbits around them."We want to see it move and live and breathe. So we want to capture the dynamics of black holes in motion," Doeleman said.The first videos will probably be jerky and low-resolution, but EHT plans to keep imaging black holes in more and more detail.Correction: May 12, 2022 — An earlier version of this story stated that Sagittarius A* is about 52 arcseconds in the sky. The story has been updated to reflect the correct size of the black hole, which is 52 microarcseconds.

Meet the black hole at the center of our galaxy: Scientists just took its picture for the first time

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Scientists in Iceland want to drill straight into an underground magma chamber.</li><li>The project could offer clues about how volcanoes work, as well as create geothermal energy.</li></ul>Scientists in Iceland want to drill a hole into a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/grindavik-iceland-magma-volcano-under-home-poised-for-eruption-evacuation-2023-11">magma chamber</a> about a mile underground in an attempt to generate limitless energy.The <a target="_blank" href="https://kmt.is/about/">Krafla Magma Testbed</a> (KMT) aims to create the world's first research center above a magma chamber to monitor, sample, and test the molten rock in situ for the first time.The center, it hopes, could offer unprecedented insights into how volcanoes work and open new avenues for limitless <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-geothermal-energy-google-2017-7">geothermal energy</a>."Magma within the Earth is the last unexplored frontier," KMT's Hjalti Páll Ingólfsson, told Business Insider.<div type="image" title="A crater is show letting off steam" height="1414" width="2121" msid="106866015" hostid="261" sizebytes="444650"></div><h2>An accidental discovery</h2>Research into magma chambers is crucial. These pools of molten rock, located in the Earth's crust, can create volcanoes if they find a way to reach the surface.But they are fiendishly difficult to locate with surface equipment and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/muons-help-map-magma-inside-volcanoes-predict-eruptions-2021-11">hard to track</a> ahead of an eruption."We don't have any direct knowledge of what magma chambers look like, which is crucial in understanding volcanoes of course," Paolo Papale at Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Pisa, who has written on the subject, told <a target="_blank" href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26134722-100-worlds-first-tunnel-to-a-magma-chamber-could-unleash-unlimited-energy/">New Scientist.</a>In 2009, scientists identified a potential candidate about 2.5 miles underground near the Krafla in Northern Iceland. So they started drilling.But about a mile into their descent, their drill got stuck. It's only later, when it came back up carrying shards of volcanic glass, that they realized what happened. They had accidentally poked their head into a magma chamber.The scientists managed to make a few measurements, but eventually, the wellhead became too warm to operate, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26134722-100-worlds-first-tunnel-to-a-magma-chamber-could-unleash-unlimited-energy/">per New Scientist</a>.They decided to pour cold water into the well to cool it down, releasing black, billowing clouds that destroyed their rigging.Now, 15 years on, KMT wants to drill into the chamber again — but this time it wants to be able to stay, with the help of a few clever engineering tricks.<h2>Getting to the magma with a glassy rock 'sock'</h2>Krafla is a perfect site for this type of experiment. The magma there is ancient and gloopy, which means it's unlikely to create an eruption or flow out of the well when you experiment on it, said Ingólfsson.Because it's so close to a volcano, any small tremors triggered by the scientists poking into the chamber are unlikely to make an impact, Jon Gluyas, a professor of Earth sciences at Durham University, told BI."If you're in Iceland, you're already in an extremely active volcanic region. There's nothing humans can do which materially will alter that one way or the other," said Gluyas.However, standard drilling rigs can't survive in these conditions."It's bloody hot. And that means the materials you'll use for drilling are not right to those sorts of temperatures," said Gluyas.One big challenge, Ingólfsson said, will be drilling straight into the magma while protecting the equipment.The solution is fairly simple: freeze the magma solid. Using water, the team aims to freeze the magma ahead of the drill bit. This will create a "sock or a pocket" of frozen glassy rock, similar to the obsidian you can find on Earth, per Ingólfsson.<div type="image" title="a picture shows Obsidian, a glassy rock, shown buried in the ground." height="1412" width="2122" msid="106866018" hostid="261" sizebytes="470088"></div>Once that's big enough, the drill bit can be removed, creating a small cavity inside the chamber to deposit some monitoring equipment before the glass sock collapses, per Ingólfsson.This should allow scientists to get an exact temperature reading of the inside of the magma chamber, which has never been done before, according to New Scientist."Will it work? That's definitely a challenge," said Ingólfsson."We think we have the equipment, we have the solutions, but it's very difficult to test those or get those accurate unless doing it in a real environment," he said.Another problem will be keeping the rigging up, a crucial point as KMT wants the boreholes to stay open. The pipes that line the hole need to face extremely high temperatures, as well as acidic environments that can eat at the metal."We are working on selecting the right materials and finding out what is the best way to design these things so it will fit and survive," said Ingólfsson.<h2>We know very little about the insides of volcanoes</h2>If it is successful, KMT could offer a whole slew of new insights into volcanic activity, Gluyas said."From a scientific perspective, being able to sample an active magma chamber would give you a whole lot of information, which is normally excruciatingly difficult to obtain," said Gluyas, who is the president of the Global Geothermal Energy Advancement Association.After all, most of what we know about volcanoes is what we see on the surface.<div type="image" title="Volcano" height="4019" width="6028" msid="106866020" hostid="261" sizebytes="3229702"></div>But by the time molten rock turns into lava, it has lost a lot of the gas that propelled it up to the surface, so we know very little about magma composition before it erupts."I'm sometimes insulting some scientists when I say that basically everything we know about inside of a volcano is kind of a guesstimate — an educated guesstimate of course," said Ingólfsson.Sampling and monitoring the magma directly could shed crucial information on what it's made of, and hopefully help us find ways to track its path underground. The glassy rock created when freezing the magma could also be a gold mine of evidence, as it could contain bubbles encapsulating the precious magmatic gases, per Gluyas."There's loads of fundamental science which will come out of it and there'll be unexpected bonuses, but there is a practical piece of this, which is better understanding of the way the Earth behaves and therefore better preparedness for potential natural disasters," said Gluyas.KMT plans to drill a second hole dedicated to geothermal research.<div type="image" title="A schematic shows two drill rigs above the magma chamber." height="840" width="778" msid="106866025" hostid="261" sizebytes="27718"></div>Ingólfsson expects one well on a magma chamber could be as productive as 10 other wells elsewhere.Not only is it very hot down there, but the magma also changes the composition of the rock, which KMT believes could make harvesting geothermal energy more efficient."The source of geothermal is always the magma and getting closer to magma is obviously a higher efficiency," said Ingólfsson.Their research, he said, could inform new ways to collect geothermal energy."You have the whole Atlantic ridge offshore. If we combine what we learn in Krafla and with what we know about offshore drilling, then you could foresee, at least as a sci-fi vision, that you could utilize it for abundant or endless energy of the Earth," he said.<div type="image" title="A top shot shows power stations near the borehole in Krafla." height="1333" width="2000" msid="106866028" hostid="261" sizebytes="122788"></div>For Gluyas, the technology could be promising, but he questioned whether it is needed at this time."If you go anywhere where there's a well-developed volcanic province, Mexico, Kenya, Ethiopia, Italy, the geothermal energy is under-exploited massively. I'm not sure how much more efficient systems would be if drilled into a magma chamber," he said.<h2>A short time to get a lot of money</h2>KMT hopes to break ground on the first hole into the magma chamber in 2026. But it still has a long road ahead.Its biggest challenge is collecting the money to build the research center and start drilling the holes. Ingólfsson estimates that KMT will need to raise upward of $100 million from governmental organizations and industry partners."We sometimes say that geology has always been setting up the wrong poker table," said Ingólfsson."In space research, you are building telescopes, like for gamma rays, which cost billions of dollars. But in geology, two or 300 million is really expensive," he said.But Ingólfsson is confident."The likelihood of us achieving something magnificent is very high in our opinion," he said.

Iceland scientists want to drill a hole straight into a reservoir of molten magma about a mile underground. It could generate limitless energy. 

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Astronomers imaged <keyword id="6520046" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="jets">jets</keyword> of hot gas swirling out of a black hole at the heart of a nearby galaxy.</li><li>Their <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01417-w">findings</a> suggest that all jets resemble one another, regardless of their <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/interstellar-anniversary-learned-about-black-holes-2019-11">black hole's mass</a>.</li><li>In 2019, the same researchers <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/supermassive-black-hole-first-photo-2019-4">zoomed in on a black hole</a> 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun. </li></ul>At the heart of every galaxy lies a supermassive black hole, which consumes everything that comes within reach of its gravitational pull - almost everything, that is.Scientists have spotted plasma jets - streams of energy and hot matter - fleeing the core of certain <keyword id="4740034" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="black-holes">black holes</keyword> at one-third the speed of light. Researchers still aren't certain how these jets form or escape celestial voids. But a <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01417-w">new study</a> gives astronomers more insight into the relationship between jets and their black hole parents.Researchers at the <keyword id="4414607" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="event-horizon-telescope">Event Horizon Telescope</keyword> collaboration - a group that reconstructed the first-ever image of a black hole two years ago - imaged plasma jets spewing from a black hole at the center of the Centaurus A galaxy, about 13 million light-years from Earth.Their observations reveal that all jets closely resemble one another, regardless of their black hole's mass. The jets are merely scaled in size, meaning smaller jets come from smaller black holes. <div type="image" title="black hole centaurus A" height="969" width="1292" msid="84624608" hostid="261"></div>Even the smallest of these jets can spread out far across the universe, though. "They disperse out to form gigantic bubbles of hot gas that are 100,000 light-years in size," Michael Janssen, an astronomer with the Max Planck Institute for Radio <keyword id="6391802" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="astronomy">Astronomy</keyword> and Radboud University and lead author of the new study, told Insider. <h2>Up close and personal with a supermassive black hole</h2>To image the Centaurus A jet, Janssen's team relied on data collected in April 2017 by eight radio telescopes synced up across the globe, forming one Earth-sized instrument. So the image is a reconstructed view, not a photograph."Think of looking into a mirror you've smashed to pieces," Janssen said. "Each shard can show you a little bit of your face. By using the limited information you get from each shard, you can piece together what you look like."<div type="image" title="black hole jet" height="2520" width="3360" msid="84624609" hostid="261"></div>This isn't the first time scientists have looked at plasma jets from a black hole. <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/radio-particle-jets.html">In 2011</a>, an international team also imaged Centaurus A's jets, but the new images are ten times more accurate and 16 times sharper than previous ones."We hit a magnification factor of 1 billion," Janssen said. "We're looking at the jet in unprecedented resolution immediately at the region where it's just being born and launched by the black hole."The sharpness helped researchers compare jets from Centaurus A's black hole - which is 55 million times more massive than our sun - to those escaping from the Messier 87 galaxy, about 54 million light-years from Earth. The Messier 87 black hole is 6.5 billion times more massive than the sun.The researchers also compared Centaurus A's jets to those from other black holes of different masses.Their findings ultimately support the idea that smaller black holes are scaled-down versions of their more massive counterparts - and act the same way regardless of their mass or how quickly they accumulate matter and energy.<h2>Magnetic fields could drive these high-speed jets</h2><div type="image" title="This image released Wednesday, April 10, 2019, by Event Horizon Telescope shows a black hole. Scientists revealed the first image ever made of a black hole after assembling data gathered by a network of radio telescopes around the world. (Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration/Maunakea Observatories via AP)" height="4320" width="7416" msid="84624610" hostid="261"></div>Supermassive black holes form when stars collapse in on themselves at the end of their life cycles.Black holes <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/this-black-hole-spins-so-fast-that-it-could-make-all-of-space-rotate-2018-11?IR=T">spin so quickly</a> that they distort space-time, and their gravity pulls in everything nearby. Because even light can't escape, these forces create a unique shadow in the form of a perfect circle at the black hole's center. The edge of this circle is known as the event horizon.That gravitational pull twists light coming from the cloud of gas, dust, and <keyword id="41531" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="space">space</keyword> detritus orbiting the black hole's center - what's known as the accretion disk."Black holes feed off this accretion disk," Janssen said. "But not all particles get swallowed up. Some get ejected by the black hole and escape in the form of these jets."<div type="image" title="black hole" height="1688" width="2251" msid="84624611" hostid="261"></div>Scientists haven't figured out yet what drives these streams of escapee particles, but Janssen suggests that <a href="https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2019/01/29/black-hole-plasma-jets/">magnetic fields</a> located at the edges of a black hole help accelerate jets.(<a href="https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/03/for-first-time-images-capture-black-holes-magnetic-fields/">Two March studies</a> by other members of the Event Horizon Telescope team found evidence of a magnetic field near the Messier 87 black hole's event horizon.)"As the black hole spins, these magnetic fields start being dragged around and get spun into a corkscrew structure," Janssen said.All the while, the coiling magnetic field collects incoming particles. Then, the field springs outward and shoots out hot gas and energy away from the black hole. The strength of the magnetic field is enough to help some particles resist a black hole's gravity.According to Janssen, the resulting jets are mindbogglingly large."If you could see these jets, and the Centaurus A black hole from Earth, the black hole would appear as large as an apple on the surface of the moon," he said, "while the jets would be 16 times as wide as the moon itself."

Scientists spotted jets of hot gas whizzing out of a supermassive black hole at the heart of a nearby galaxy

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Scientists recently captured a <keyword id="6409890" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="black-hole">black hole</keyword>'s powerful magnetic fields on camera.</li><li>The image shows that these magnetic fields are strong enough to keep some matter from falling in.</li><li>Matter that doesn't get sucked in gets launched back into <keyword id="41531" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="space">space</keyword> in the form of jets.</li></ul>When scientists published the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/supermassive-black-hole-first-photo-event-horizon-telescope-m87-2019-4">first photo of a black hole</a> in 2019, the image <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/black-hole-some-people-disappointed-first-ever-photo-2019-4">looked more like a smudge</a> than a detailed snapshot. But a new photo released Wednesday offers a sharper view of the powerful magnetic fields that loop around the black hole's inner edge.Since 2009, scientists from the international <a href="https://eventhorizontelescope.org/">Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration</a> have been observing the black hole at the center of the super-giant <keyword id="7515846" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="Messier-87">Messier 87</keyword> (M87) <keyword id="55852" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="Galaxy">galaxy</keyword>, which is about 54 million light-years from Earth.Most matter that gets close to the edge of a black hole gets sucked into the event horizon - the boundary after which the black hole's gravity is so strong that anything, including light, gets devoured. But some particles manage to escape the abyss and instead get launched into space in the form of jets that extend far beyond the galaxy's edge.Before <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/abe4de">their</a> <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/abe71d">new research</a> was published on Wednesday, the EHT scientists knew that magnetic fields played some role in ejecting matter from this black hole and others like it."The open question from the first image [in 2019] was exactly what the structure of those magnetic fields were and how strong they are," Andrew Chael, a NASA Hubble Fellow at the Princeton Center for Theoretical <keyword id="41551" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="100" keywordseo="science">Science</keyword>, told Insider. After observing the new image, the scientists discovered that the magnetic fields surrounding M87's black hole are actually quite strong - around <a href="https://astronomy.com/news/2021/03/global-telescope-creates-exquisite-map-of-black-holes-magnetic-field">2 to 50 times stronger</a> than Earth's magnetic field."They sort of build up onto the black hole and push back against the gas that's falling in," Chael said. "Some of the gas falls in, but some of it is accelerated by the magnetic fields out to really large distances."<div type="image" title="m87 galaxy" height="1234" width="1646" msid="81681841" hostid="261"></div><h2>Clues from light</h2>Chael said he was pleasantly surprised by the level of detail revealed in the new photo."One of the things we all expected from the first images was that it might be really hard to interpret them," he said.His team was able to analyze the black hole's magnetic fields because of the light emitted by the black hole's accretion disk, or outer ring of hot matter. When this matter encounters a strong magnetic field, the light waves become polarized - meaning they prefer to travel in a certain direction. Polarized light is therefore a glaring indicator that magnetic fields are present. By observing the direction of this light in their images, the EHT scientists were able to map the magnetic field lines - and ultimately estimate their strength.Their new research marks the first time that astronomers have been able to measure polarization this close to the edge of a black hole.<h2>More telescopes will help with future black-hole investigations</h2><div type="image" title="black hole jet" height="2520" width="3360" msid="81681842" hostid="261"></div>The EHT scientists used a global network of eight telescopes to capture their first image of M87's black hole. Chael said the group is adding more telescopes to its lineup in hopes of eventually collecting video.Such footage may reveal the black hole's motion as it spews particles into space."As it launches material out into this jet, can we see the dynamics of what's happening?" Chael said. "Can we trace movies of material as it's ejected along these field lines? That's one of the big goals in the coming years."At the very least, scientists should be able to get a clearer picture of the black hole's large jet, which spans several thousand light-years. Right now, Chael said, the jet appears dim in images as it gets further away from the black hole."Something we'd really like to be able to do is see the base of the jet in the image," Chael said. "If we had a few more telescopes in our array, we should be able to see that."

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