The shadow of the black hole in Messier 87 has been imaged with global radio array telescopes over the last years. Joint campaigns have been coordinated annually ever since. An international team of researchers has just released the results of a large campaign on M87 of Event Horizon Telescope and Global mm-VLBI Array observations in 2018, involving over twenty-five ground-based and space-based telescopes.
The team report a spectacular flare at multiple wavelengths from the powerful relativistic jet emanating from the very centre of the same galaxy.
This study reveals the first observation in over a decade of a high-energy gamma-ray flare. Photons up to thousands of billions of times the energy of visible light from the supermassive black hole M87* were detected after obtaining nearly simultaneous spectra of that galaxy with the broadest wavelength coverage ever collected. Read more here.
Image: © EHT Collaboration, Fermi-LAT Collaboration, H.E.S.S. Collaboration, MAGIC Collaboration, VERITAS Collaboration, EAVN Collaboration; Light curve of the gamma-ray flare (bottom) and collection of quasi-simultaneously observed images of the M87 jet (top) at various scales obtained in radio and X-ray during the 2018 campaign. The telescopes, the wavelength observation range and scale are shown at the top right of each image.
