Space scientists baffled by supermassive black hole’s cosmic flip-flop

New images have revealed the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy M87 flipping its gravitational field.

The data from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration shows that while the bright, ring-shaped shadow of the black hole remained steady, the magnetic fields threading the surrounding plasma dramatically changed direction, reversing their spiral.

This discovery challenges existing theoretical models and highlights a turbulent, evolving environment at the black hole’s edge, where magnetic forces govern how matter falls in and jets of energy are launched outwards.

These new observations, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, are providing fresh insight into how matter and energy behave in the extreme environments surrounding black holes.

Located about 55 million light-years away from Earth, M87 harbors this supermassive black hole, more than six billion times the mass of the Sun.

The EHT, a global network of radio telescopes acting as an Earth-sized observatory, first captured the iconic image of M87’s black hole shadow in 2019.

Now, by comparing observations from 2017, 2018, and 2021, scientists have taken the next step towards uncovering how the magnetic fields near the black hole change over time.

Paul Tiede, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and a co-lead of the new study, said: "What’s remarkable is that while the ring size has remained consistent over the years, confirming the black hole’s shadow predicted by Einstein’s the polarization pattern changes significantly.

"This tells us that the magnetized plasma swirling near the event horizon is far from static; it’s dynamic and complex, pushing our theoretical models to the limit."