Supermassive black holes appear to occupy the center of almost all galaxies. When they are actively swallowing matter, these black holes can power energetic jets that shine brighter than the entire rest of the galaxy, and can shoot matter free of it. Despite the mass and energy involved, however, the origin of these jets has been extremely hard to image, both because they're relatively compact, and because they're situated in the crowded centers of distant galaxies.

Now, however, researchers are putting together an array of telescopes stretched across the globe with the specific goal of imaging the environment near these supermassive black holes. The team behind the Event Horizon Telescope has now used it to image the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy, and returned the first details of the disk of matter that is being sucked into that galaxy's central black hole.

It's difficult to imagine the environment near a supermassive black hole. These objects are typically over a million times the mass of our Sun, but all of that matter is crammed into a space that may only be a fraction of the Sun's radius. Any matter falling into one piles up into an orbiting disk of material (called an accretion disk) that increases in density and energy as you get closer to black hole. Any matter that crosses a critical point, however, rapidly spirals inward to the black hole itself. The inner area of the disk is so energetic that it actually sends matter away from the black hole in a wind of particles.

But that's not the most energetic part. Even further inward, the intense magnetic field lines sometimes cross the event horizon of the black hole itself, propelling intense beams of charged particles away from the black hole. These jets interact with the wind of particles coming from the accretion disk, which focuses them into narrow beams that move at nearly the speed of light. These have so much energy that they are (in some cases) able to propel particles for hundreds of thousands of light years, sending them entirely out of the galaxy, where the particles eventually slow by interacting with the intergalactic medium.

Or that's what theoretical considerations seem to tell us. To actually image any of this, however, has been a serious challenge. It's what the Event Horizon Telescope was intended to solve. In a paper in this week's edition of Science, four of the telescope's instruments were pointed towards the center of M87: Hawaii's James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the Submillimeter Telescope in Arizona, and two telescopes at CARMA in California. By carefully timing the incoming signals at each of these scopes (and using the two neighboring instruments in California to refine the signal), the researchers could turn these distant instruments into a single, giant telescope, one that could resolve details of the environment near the central black hole.

This system managed to image the area around the black hole down to a resolution on the scale of the Schwarzchild radius. And they were able to spot that the base of the high-energy jets is only a few times the size of the black hole itself (5.5 times the Schwarzchild radius), which "is consistent with scales on which energy is extracted from the black hole and accretion disk to feed the jet."

This also tells us something about the accretion disk. If the disk and black hole were rotating in opposite directions, the inner edge of the disk would be much further from the black hole itself than if they were rotating in the same direction. The size of the jets seen here is too small to arise from a system where the two bodies are rotating in opposite directions, so we can conclude that the disk is following the rotation of the black hole it orbits.

(Ars contributor Matthew Francis has provided more details on the structure of the accretion disk at his personal blog.)

Even if the Event Horizon Telescope is improved, we're not likely to get a better picture of the black hole's environment, because the model built from the observation runs up against limits that arise from our uncertainties regarding the distance to M87 and the mass of the black hole within it. But the authors hope to be able to use the telescope to continue observations over longer periods of time, since the accretion disk probably contains an uneven distribution of matter, which could create periodic irregularities in the output.

Plus, eventually, they hope to turn the telescope on our own galaxy's black hole. It's not as active as M87's, but it still seems to be swallowing enough matter to make checking it out at high resolution worth our while.

Science, 2012. DOI: 10.1126/science.1224768 (About DOIs).