Summary
The astronomy team that 2 years ago captured the first close-up of a giant black hole, lurking at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, has now zoomed in on a second, somewhat smaller giant, in the nearby active galaxy Centaurus A. The Event Horizon Telescope merges dozens of widely dispersed radio dishes, from Hawaii to France and from Greenland to the South Pole, into a huge virtual telescope. Its latest image should help resolve questions about how such galactic centers funnel huge amounts of matter into powerful beams and fire them thousands of light-years into space. Together the images also support theorists’ belief that all black holes are essentially simple objects and operate the same way, despite huge variations in their masses.
