It’s been about a year since the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration released the first image of a black hole. That groundbreaking snapshot featured the supermassive black hole at the center of M87, a massive elliptical galaxy 55 million light-years from Earth.

Now, the EHT Collaboration has released a new image, which shows a jet shooting from the nearly 1-billion-solar-mass black hole 3C 279, located about 5 billion light-years away. The results associated with the image were published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Twisted jet

At the heart of almost every galaxy lies a supermassive black hole. Sometimes those black holes are quiescent, like the one at the center of our Milky Way. But sometimes those black holes are violently active, and 3C 279 is in the latter category. 3C 279 is what astronomers call a blazar — an actively feeding supermassive black hole shooting out a powerful jet very nearly pointed straight at Earth.The new EHT image shows the black hole's jet, which is generated extremely close to the black hole itself, down to a resolution better than half a light-year. With such an an unprecedented, up-close view, astronomers spotted something unusual about the jet. Instead of seeing it shoot straight out from the region around the black hole, which the team expected, the base of the jet appears twisted or kinked, with glowing features extending perpendicular to the path of its motion.According to co-author Thomas Krichbaum at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, seeing such features is hard to explain with the simplest models of outward-moving jets. Instead, they indicate something more complicated is going on, such as rotation or instabilities within the jet itself.“This is like finding a very different shape by opening the smallest Matryoshka [Russian nesting] doll,” said lead author Jae-Young Kim, also of the MPIfR, in a press release