"Hubble's Inside the Image / M87 JET"
This an image of something called M87.
M stands for Messier, and Messier was an astronomer
who was very interested in finding comets.
But he didn't want to find duds.
He didn't find false alarms. This is one of them.
And, you can see why
if you were looking at something like that
in a small telescope, you might think it was a comet.
And if we keep drilling down into why M87
is such a fascinating galaxy, it is an elliptical galaxy.
And it's been known for quite a long time that there was this little thing
of brightness that was spewing away from it.
And now we know that that's actually a jet of material.
When Hubble was launched, we had really good clues
that galaxies probably had black holes at their centers.
So M87 does indeed have a very massive supermassive black
hole at its core on the 2 to 3 billion times solar mass level.
And that's a very massive supermassive black hole, but it's also active.
Why? So why are galaxies active?
Not all galaxies are active.
Just a few percent are active at any given time.
Are they turning on and turning off? That's an idea.
You know, maybe there's some mechanical physics going on at the center
of these galaxies where the black hole has an accretion disk.
And that material is getting spun up so quickly.
We know there's very high magnetic fields that you launch a jet.
And so this image is observational evidence that what we've been seeing for
a while is actually being launched by a jet
connected to that supermassive black hole at the center of M87.
What we're seeing here is one jet.
So we can assume that this material here that's making up the bulk of M87’s
huge stellar population is obscuring the other jet.
In order to get a jet like that, you need a magnetic field to accelerate particles.
And you also need a source of charged particles.
So, that means that you need, near the core of that galaxy, a disk of material
and that that disk of material needs to be spewing in towards the black hole.
It's got a huge amount of gravity. It's going to suck stuff in.
And when it gets close enough,
it starts to accelerate those particles to ever increasing rates
and then spews them out along magnetic field lines.
We've got lots of particles and they are being accelerated
at nearly the speed of light.
The actual connection between having a supermassive black hole
an accretion disk and launching
a jet is still one of the mysteries of high energy astrophysics.
How does that get launched?
What is the actual physics between the black hole, the disk and that jet?
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