Messier 87 is already famous for a photograph most people have seen: the Event Horizon Telescope image of the black hole at its center. Yet the black hole’s most dramatic feature is not the dark ring at the core. It is a jet of particles that extends thousands of light-years into space.
Now, a team using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory reports its sharpest X-ray view yet of that jet. By combining observations taken between 2012 and 2025 with a refined image-processing method, the researchers were able to follow structures within the outflow as they changed over more than a decade.
The result was released by the Chandra X-ray Center on June 15 and presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting. The accompanying paper is available as a preprint, so the findings should be read as a detailed research report still moving through the normal scientific process.
A jet powered by the galaxy’s central black hole
M87 lies about 55 million light-years away. At its center is a supermassive black hole, the one that became the first black hole ever directly imaged in 2019. Material falling inward does not all disappear beyond the event horizon. Magnetic fields and the rotating disk around the black hole can channel some energy outward in narrow, high-speed jets.
In M87, one of those jets is visible across much of the electromagnetic spectrum. Optical, radio, infrared and X-ray observations each reveal different parts of the same extraordinary flow. Chandra is especially valuable because X-rays trace particles accelerated to extreme energies.
Earlier X-ray images showed the jet, but some fine structures blurred together. The new analysis uses deconvolution, a way of recovering detail from a telescope image while accounting for the instrument’s response. The approach brought the X-ray view into closer agreement with features visible in Hubble and Webb data.
Why some knots appear to outrun light
The researchers found that some structures in the jet appear nearly stationary while others change position quickly. The fastest feature seemed to move at almost five times the speed of light. Nothing in the jet is actually breaking relativity.
This is an effect called apparent superluminal motion. If material travels very close to light speed in a direction that is angled toward Earth, light from later positions has less distance to travel than light emitted earlier. The motion can therefore look faster than light when it is projected across the sky. It is a geometry effect, not a cosmic loophole.
That distinction is important because the apparent motion still tells astronomers something real: the jet contains different regions moving and brightening in different ways. The flow is not a smooth, unchanging beam.
A laboratory for extreme physics
Black-hole jets influence the galaxies around them. They can heat gas, move energy away from a galactic center and alter the conditions under which stars form. Understanding how particles are accelerated inside a jet therefore reaches beyond one famous black hole.
The Chandra team says the new X-ray view is consistent with models in which shocks within the flow, together with magnetic fields, shape the structures being observed. It also gives astronomers something unusually rare: a chance to watch a phenomenon in a distant galaxy evolve on human timescales.
For readers who want to see why Chandra’s images look so different from ordinary optical astronomy, Curiosmos has an earlier collection of Chandra X-ray Observatory images. M87 is a reminder that the same universe can look radically different depending on the kind of light a telescope is built to collect.
The new work does not replace the iconic black-hole image. It adds motion to it. Instead of a single historic frame, astronomers are beginning to follow the behavior of the jet that the black hole has been launching into intergalactic space.
What the image processing changes
Deconvolution is not a way to invent detail. It is a mathematical method that uses a telescope’s known point-spread function to estimate which structures are most consistent with the recorded data. The team can compare the sharpened X-ray features with images from other observatories, a useful check when working at the edge of an instrument’s resolution.
That matters in M87 because the jet is a moving target. Better resolved structures make it possible to tell whether a bright knot has shifted, faded or separated into smaller components over time.
The observational baseline is the quiet strength of the project. A decade of images can separate a momentary brightening from a genuine change in the flow, which is exactly what a single striking image cannot do.
