In a paper just published in Nature, the image showing the supermassive black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy known as M87 was put together using 2018 data collected by telescopes around the world, including the Atacama Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile.

Astronomers combined data from the telescopes to create a virtual Earth-sized telescope using a technique called interferometry that synchronizes their signals.

Black holes lurking at the center of M87 can shoot huge jets of matter far beyond the edges of their host galaxies. The galaxy that hosts the black hole is about 55 million light-years away, and M87 itself is 6.5 billion times larger than the Sun.

How black holes like this launch these jets is still a mystery, but this new image could help solve that mystery.

"We know that jets are ejected from the region surrounding black holes, but we still don't fully understand how this actually happens. To study this directly, we need to observe the jet's source as close to the black hole as possible," Ru-Sen Lu of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China said in a statement. said.

The image is based on a previous image of the same black hole taken by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2017 and published in 2019. But the new image shows M87's black hole at a much longer wavelength.

As a result, the new observation shows that the ring-like structure surrounding the black hole is about 50 percent larger than in the 2017 image of ETH. Astronomers believe this is because more of the material falling toward the black hole is visible in the new observations.