Chandra tracks M87’s evolving black hole jet in record-breaking X-ray detail

In April 2019, an international collaboration handed humanity its first photograph of a black hole’s silhouette. The target was M87*, a black hole weighing some 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun, sitting at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87, roughly 55 million light-years from Earth. Seven years later, that same object is making headlines again, not for its shadow, but for the matter it ejects. A new analysis of thirteen years of NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory data has produced the sharpest X-ray portrait ever taken of the relativistic jet launched by M87’s black hole, revealing a far more dynamic and structured outflow than anyone had resolved in X-rays before.

Thirteen years of data sharpened through deconvolution

The study, led by Camille Poitras, a doctoral student at Université Laval in Québec, combined Chandra observations gathered between 2012 and 2025 with the observatory’s High Resolution Camera. Until now, X-ray images of the M87 jet looked comparatively blurry next to the crisp views already available at radio and optical wavelengths, where instruments like the Very Large Array, the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope routinely separate features that Chandra’s optics could only show as merged blobs. By applying a point-spread-function deconvolution technique, the team pushed the X-ray resolution down to roughly a tenth of an arcsecond, finally letting Chandra keep pace with its multiwavelength counterparts and exposing structure that had simply been unreachable before.

A jet full of moving parts

The sharper images split apart features that earlier Chandra data had blended into single blobs, including two separate components inside HST-1, the bright knot that has fascinated jet researchers for two decades, along with more complex shapes further downstream in the region known as knot A. Tracking these structures across more than a decade revealed a mix of behaviors: some knots barely shift position, while others race across the plane of the sky at apparent speeds that seem to defy the speed of light. The fastest feature measured inside HST-1 reached an apparent velocity of about 4.8 times the speed of light. This is not a violation of relativity but a geometric effect called superluminal motion, which occurs when material moving close to the true speed of light travels nearly straight toward the observer, compressing the time it takes for that motion to register from Earth.

Fading knots and the magnetic fields that shape them

Beyond motion, the team measured brightness across the jet and found a broad decline in X-ray emission, with some regions fading by as much as 84 percent over the study period. That kind of dimming is the signature of synchrotron cooling, the process by which electrons accelerated to extreme energies spiral around magnetic field lines and gradually lose energy as they radiate it away, in this case as X-rays. By modeling how quickly different knots faded, the researchers estimated minimum magnetic field strengths of roughly 324 to 1,006 microgauss inside HST-1 and 41 to 115 microgauss in knot A, figures that, while a tiny fraction of Earth’s own magnetic field, are more than enough to keep particles radiating across thousands of light-years of jet.

Lining up Chandra with Hubble, Webb and the VLA

A composite image released alongside the study layers Chandra’s X-ray data, shown in purple, against infrared observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, optical data from Hubble, and radio data from the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array. For the scientific comparison itself, the team also checked their sharpened X-ray maps against archival ALMA observations. Across that range of wavelengths, the main X-ray structures generally line up with the width and position of knots already known from lower-energy observations, but with one consistent twist: the X-ray-emitting regions tend to sit slightly closer to the black hole than their counterparts at longer wavelengths. That offset fits naturally with synchrotron cooling, since the highest-energy electrons responsible for X-rays lose their energy fastest, so the X-ray glow effectively traces the freshest, most recently accelerated particles in the flow, while the radio, infrared and optical light comes from material that has had more time to drift downstream and cool.

Why a decades-old jet still matters today

Jets like M87’s are how supermassive black holes give back to their host galaxies. Only a fraction of the matter falling toward the event horizon actually crosses it; much of the released gravitational energy is funneled instead into these high-speed outflows, which can carry particles and energy for thousands of light-years and influence how surrounding gas cools, forms stars, or gets swept away entirely. The new Chandra results support models in which internal shocks, created when faster and slower sections of the flow collide much like sonic booms from supersonic aircraft, work together with the jet’s magnetic field to accelerate particles and sculpt its substructure over time. Co-author Gerrit Schellenberger, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian, noted that this kind of long-term monitoring is central to understanding how energy released near a supermassive black hole eventually gets deposited into its host galaxy. The results were presented at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, California.

M87’s black hole already gave the world its first close-up of an event horizon. Now its jet is showing that even a target studied for decades can still surprise us once the right technique sharpens the view.

Source: Camille Poitras et al., «Resolving the Temporal Evolution of the M87 Jet with ≲0.1-arcsec Chandra Observations,» arXiv preprint (2026), pending peer review. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2606.13800.

© 2026 SKYCR.ORG | Homer Dávila Gutiérrez, FRAS. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part is prohibited without express authorization. Original source: NASA Chandra X-ray Center / Université Laval, via phys.org.