Did you know that although light can’t escape a black hole’s event horizon, the enormous tidal forces in its vicinity cause nearby matter to heat up to millions of degrees and emit radio waves and X-rays?
Some of the material orbiting even closer to the event horizon may be hurled out, forming jets of particles moving near the speed of light that emit radio, X-rays and gamma rays. Jets from supermassive black holes can extend hundreds of thousands of light-years into space.
The supermassive black hole imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope is located in the center of the elliptical galaxy M87, located about 55 million light years from Earth. This image was captured by FORS2 on NASA’s Earth System Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. The short linear feature near the center of the image is a jet produced by the black hole.
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Credits: NASA
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