The jet from the heart of the monster
The Event Horizon Telescope has managed to take another spectacular picture: The target was the relatively nearby active galaxy Centaurus A.
The photo album of the telescope network called Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is filling up. In 2019, the EHT collaboration made headlines worldwide: for the first time, it directly imaged a black hole - the one in the center of the galaxy Messier 87. Now this photo album is growing. Researchers present their picture of the heart of the active one in the journal "Nature Astronomy". Galaxy Centaurus A in front. It shows details of the high-energy jet that the black hole shoots into space there. Active and Dormant Black Holes Centaurus A's central black hole, at 55 million solar masses, is intermediate in size between the now famous Messier 87 black hole and our own extremely massive Sagittarius A black hole at the center of the Milky Way system. Among other things, the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for its discovery. However, Sagittarius A only has a comparatively low 4.3 million solar masses. It's pretty quiet around it, at least for now, because the hole is starving.
