Astronomers have recently made a breakthrough studying the supermassive black hole M87*, a behemoth six and a half billion times the mass of the Sun, and have uncovered a new way these galactic demons unleash their power.
While employing state-of-art stimulations, scientists at Goethe University Frankfurt revealed that not just magnetic fields but a process called magnetic reconnection helps extract energy from a spinning black hole to launch material stretching thousands of light-years.
However, these massive stellar beams, moving at nearly the speed of light speed, dissipate energy and matter across galaxies, driving a transformation.
Astronomers were doubtful about the true nature of the bright object in the constellation Virgo which Charles Messier recorded in 1784 as ‘M87’: Nebula without stars, for nearly 200 years.
Scientists had no idea what could be producing it when an enigmatic beam was spotted coming from its centre in 1918.
This black hole, 100 years in the making, spins rapidly, and its rotation powers a stream of charged particles that shoots out at nearly the speed of light and stretches 5,000 light-years into space.
It has been observed that similar jets are seen around rotating black holes, helping to dissipate energy and matter throughout the universe and ultimately shaping the growth of galaxies.