When reading our blog posts, you might find yourself asking what the scale of the black holes, jets, or accretion disks we speak of are. If that is the case, then this post is for you! Given that Halloween just happened, let us choose our base unit as one Jack-o’-lantern pumpkin (JOLP) that is 20 kg heavy and 0.5 meters in diameter. For scale, roughly four JOLPs stacked on top of each other would span a human that is 1.8 meters tall and 80 kg heavy. Right, then how many JOLPs would we need to span the entire circumference of the Earth? Well, we would need about 80 million (80…
Read More >>Unveiled shape of magnetic field around black hole from polarized light
A couple of weeks ago, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration has revealed, for the first time, the black hole image of the M87 in polarized light. This is the next big step closer to better understanding how accreting materials evolve and how M87 launches the energetic jets, which extend at least 5000 light-years. Light becomes polarized when it propagates through filters like the lenses of polarized sunglasses. Such sunglasses have been used to protect our eyes and enhance our vision by reducing the glare of the sun or the reflected light. Likewise, we can see better the region around the black hole from the polarized light, which is emitted…
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