JWST Reveals Stunning New Details About M87’s Supermassive Black Hole Jet

Recent images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are the clearest ever pictures of the jet arriving from the massive black hole in the galaxy named Messier 87 (M87). There are clear details in the image shot by the telescope, which show the change of brightness, shape and the jet that is usually in disguise. As per scientists, this discovery will help them learn how black holes send out such powerful jets, while also explaining the way they affect the galaxies near them.

M87 Black Hole

According to Space.com, the first direct photo of the M87 black hole has fascinated scientists from the outset. This new JWST image resembles a pink ribbon on a purple backdrop, spanning thousands of light-years. Bright spots appear along the jet where particles are speeding up.

NIRCam of the telescope also found a very small second jet that is going in the reverse direction, a few are around 6,000 light-years of distance from the blackhole. It is usually hard to observe as it is dimmer, but there is a sharp view with Webb. It precisely removes the background light sources, and the scientists have been able to spot it.

Closer to the black hole, the jet looks twisted, like a spiral. A region called HST-1 breaks into two smaller parts, each with different brightness, showing that shock waves and complex movements happen near the black hole. Another slower part, called “knot L,” also shows up, proving the jet has many layers of activity.

Findings

The study shows that the jet's light mostly comes from synchrotron radiation, this happens when charged particles spin around magnetic fields. By looking at the small colour changes in the jet, scientists can see how particles speed up, cool down, and twist. These details reveal how black holes control their environment.

Comments

Hubble Uncovers Multi-Age Stars in Ancient Cluster, Reshaping Galaxy Origins

Astronomers call ancient star clusters like NGC 1786 “time capsules” for their galaxy, preserving some of its oldest stars. A new image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope offers an unprecedented close-up of this dense cluster 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Hubble's data show that NGC 1786 contains stars of different ages – a surprising find, since such clusters were once thought to hold a single stellar generation. This multi-age discovery is reshaping our view of how galaxies built their first stars, and suggests more complex early history. Mixed-Age Stars in a Galactic Time Capsule According to the official source, this Hubble image shows the globular cluster NGC 1786, a ball of densely packed stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud about 160,000 light-years from Earth. Astronomers captured this picture as part of a program comparing ancient clusters in nearby dwarf galaxies (like the LMC) with clusters in our own Milky Way. The surprising discovery is th...

CSIRO Uses Quantum AI to Revolutionize Semiconductor Design

Researchers at Australia's CSIRO have achieved a world-first demonstration of quantum machine learning in semiconductor fabrication. The quantum-enhanced model outperformed conventional AI methods and could reshape how microchips are designed. The team focused on modeling a crucial—but hard to predict—property called “Ohmic contact” resistance, which measures how easily current flows where metal meets a semiconductor. They analysed 159 experimental samples from advanced gallium nitride (GaN) transistors (known for high power/high-frequency performance). By combining a quantum processing layer with a final classical regression step, the model extracted subtle patterns that traditional approaches had missed. Tackling a difficult design problem According to the study, the CSIRO researchers first encoded many fabrication variables (like gas mixtures and annealing times) per device and used principal component analysis (PCA) to shrink 37 parameters down to the five most important ones. ...

A Planet with a Death Wish: How HIP 67522 b Is Forcing Its Star to Explode

Scientists have caught a planet with a death wish, which is an alien world, orbiting very near to its star, and so speedy that it is causing the star to go to its death with bursting explosions. HIP 67522 b is the planet, and it is of the same size as Jupiter with a seven-day orbit around its host star. These orbits are disturbing the magnetic field of the star and causing enormous blasting eruptions to blow back the planet and make it wrinkled. This is the first time that a planet is influencing the host star, as the astronomers reported in a study published on July 2, 2025, in the Journal Nature. A Planet with a Death Wish: HIP 67522 b's Fiery Orbit As per the study by NASA, Ekaterina Ilin, the first author of the study and an astrophysicist at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, said that the planet was observed to trigger the energetic flares. It has been predicted by the scientists that the waves are setting off explosions that are going to happen. Magnetic Chaos: P...

Kartavya Kant Tiwari

Search This Blog