For decades, astronomers have observed a type of material ejected by the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, which is located approximately 55 million light years from Earth. These jets move through space at unimaginable speeds. Now, researcher Ralph Kraft, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and his team have managed to calculate the speed of this movement thanks to X-ray observations from the orbiting Chandra telescope.
Black holes like the one at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 (dubbed M87*) eject jets in the form of clusters or knots. The result of calculating the speed of two of these knots left experts astonished, since the first knot appears to be traveling at a speed 6.3 times greater than the speed of light and the second at 2.4 times.
The results of this study are so extraordinary that astrophysicists are very cautious about it, since one of the unalterable laws of physics is that nothing can move faster than the speed of light.
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| A 5,000 light-year-long jet has been ejected from M87. (NASA/Hubble Heritage Team/STScI/AURA) |
So what could be happening? The phenomenon is called “superluminal motion.” To analyze it, we need to take into account the speed of the object and its path in relation to our line of sight.
When an object is moving close to the speed of light and close to our line of sight, it creates an illusion called superluminal motion. This is because the jet of material itself is traveling nearly as fast as the light it generates. Because M87*'s jet is pointing almost directly at Earth, it results in these seemingly impossible speeds.
(NASA/Wikimedia)
Even though the material ejected from M87* isn’t breaking the laws of physics, the speed it’s reaching is impressive. According to the researchers, the jets are traveling at 99 percent of the speed of light. “Our work provides the strongest evidence yet that particles in the M87* jet are indeed traveling close to the cosmic speed limit,” said Brad Snios, a co-author of the study and a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In 2019, M87* made headlines for being the first black hole to be photographed.
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