◀ Anchor ▶
A black hole in the universe, an unknown world.
An international research team, including Korean researchers, confirmed that there is a huge magnetic field at the edge of a black hole, a whopping 55 million light-years away from Earth.
But what does it mean to discover this magnetic field?
This is reporter Lee Seung-seop.
◀ Report ▶
This is a super-large black hole in the Virgo M87 galaxy, first observed by humans two years ago.
It is 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass of 6.5 billion times that of the Sun.
A spiral light emanates from the edge of a black hole, forming a ring.
Light has the property of coming out in all directions, which means that it goes in a specific direction, that is, polarization occurs when a magnetic field is formed.
It was the first to be confirmed for the presence of a magnetic field at the edge of a black hole.
[김재영/한국천문연구원 전파천문본부 선임연구원]
“The magnetic field is very well-organized and strong enough to create conditions sufficient for some degree of interaction with the black hole.”
The strength of the black hole’s magnetic field is estimated to be about 100 times that of the Earth’s magnetic field.
Considering the size of a black hole larger than the solar system, it is as if there is a huge and powerful magnet in the universe.
Black holes consume everything around them with tremendous gravity.
In addition, the material that enters the black hole can be blown away from space by erupting the speed of light, which is called a’jet’ phenomenon.
In particular, it was a scientific mystery that jets larger than the size of a galaxy occur at the center of the galaxy, and this discovery is likely to be a crucial clue to the principle.
[손봉원/한국천문연구원 전파천문본부 책임연구원]
“The strength of the magnetic field shows that black holes play a very important role in creating jets. (It will help to understand jets close to the speed of light.”
The international collaborative team plans to conduct additional precision observations to analyze the magnetic field structure and matter around the black hole, and further establish and prove a new hypothesis about the formation of black holes and jet phenomena.
This is Lee Seung-seop, MBC News.
MBC News awaits your report 24 hours a day.
▷ Phone 02-784-4000
▷ Email [email protected]
▷ KakaoTalk @mbc report