New Delhi | Jagran Trending Desk: Last year, a team of scientists with the help of a global network of synchronized radio observatories, also called Event Horizon Telescope, revealed the first ever picture of a black hole. Now, these reserachers have reassessed some of the image data for fresh perspective on the object known as M87*, which is located around 54 million light-years away from Earth and has the monster mass of 6.5 billion Suns.

Using data acquired for more than a decade, scientists analyzed the behavior of the black hole image across this period, indicating persistence of the crescent-like shadow feature, but also variation of its orientation — the crescent appears to be wobbling.

This phenomenon (wobbling) could be attributed to gas and material that’s falling onto the black hole heat. These matter, heated to billions of degrees, twists and turns through what are intense magnetic fields. And as it does so, the region of brightness seen in the black hole’s encircling ring of gas appears to wobble.

“The gas falling onto a black hole heats up to billions of degrees, ionizes, and becomes turbulent in the presence of magnetic fields. Because the flow of matter is turbulent, the crescent appears to wobble with time,” explained Maciek Wielgus of the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Notably, these massive black holes could pave way for scientists to gather more information about the nature of a significant fraction of the mysterious dark matter that makes up four-fifths of the matter in the universe. 

Studying the dynamics of the black holé shadow could also help experts in formulating new tests for Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Posted By: Rakesh Kumar Jha