THE black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy may be twice as big as originally thought – possibly large enough to measure directly.
M87 is 55 million light years away. Its central black hole devours vast amounts of gas and spews out a huge jet of particles that extends far into intergalactic space.
Karl Gebhardt at the University of Texas at Austin and Thomas Jens of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, weighed M87 by running existing data through a new model that simulates the galaxy on a supercomputer. Unlike earlier efforts, the model…
