The magnetic field swirling around an enormous black hole, located about 55 million light-years from Earth, has unexpectedly switched directions. This dramatic reversal challenges theories of black hole physics and provides scientists with new clues about the dynamic nature of these shadowy giants.
The supermassive black hole, nestled in the heart of the M87 galaxy, was first imaged in 2017. Those images revealed, for the first time, a glowing ring of plasma — an accretion disk — encircling the black hole, dubbed M87*. At the time, the disk’s properties, including those of the magnetic field embedded in the plasma, matched theoretical predictions.
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