The Event Horizon of M87

Abstract

The 6 billion solar mass supermassive black hole at the center of the giant elliptical galaxy M87 powers a relativistic jet. Observations at millimeter wavelengths with the Event Horizon Telescope have localized the emission from the base of this jet to angular scales comparable to the putative black hole horizon. The jet might be powered directly by an accretion disk or by electromagnetic extraction of the rotational energy of the black hole. However, even the latter mechanism requires a confining thick accretion disk to maintain the required magnetic flux near the black hole. Therefore, regardless of the jet mechanism, the observed jet power in M87 implies a certain minimum mass accretion rate. If the central compact object in M87 were not a black hole but had a surface, this accretion would result in considerable thermal near-infrared and optical emission from the surface. Current flux limits on the nucleus of M87 strongly constrain any such surface emission. This rules out the presence of a surface and thereby provides indirect evidence for an event horizon.

9 pages, 2 figures, submitted to ApJ

References in corpus (11)

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Cited by in corpus (28)

• First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. I. The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole
• First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. VI. The Shadow and Mass of the Central Black Hole
• First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. V. Physical Origin of the Asymmetric Ring
• First Sagittarius A* Event Horizon Telescope Results. VI: Testing the Black Hole Metric
• First Sagittarius A* Event Horizon Telescope Results. IV. Variability, Morphology, and Black Hole Mass
• Faraday rotation in the jet of M87 inside the Bondi radius: indication of winds from hot accretion flows confining the relativistic jet
• Towards a Non-singular Paradigm of Black Hole Physics
• Influence of an anisotropic matter field on the shadow of a rotating black hole
• Gravitational lensing by a Horndeski black hole
• Towards VLBI Observations of Black Hole Structure
• Gravitational Vacuum Condensate Stars
• Horizonless spacetimes as seen by present and next-generation Event Horizon Telescope arrays
• M87: a cosmic laboratory for deciphering black hole accretion and jet formation
• Shadow thermodynamics of non-linear charged Anti-de Sitter black holes
• Acceleration of high energy protons in AGN relativistic jets
• Polarization Observations of AGN Jets: Past and Future
• Constraints on the black-hole charges of M87* and Sagittarius A* by changing rates of photon spheres can be relaxed
• Jet in jet in M87
• High energy particle collisions in static, spherically symmetric black-hole-like wormholes
• Centrifugal acceleration of protons by a supermassive black hole
• Gravitational lensing and shadow of charged black holes in the low-energy limit of string theory
• Echoes from beyond: Detecting gravitational-wave quantum imprints with LISA
• WISE2MBH: A scaling-based algorithm for probing supermassive black hole masses through WISE catalogues
• Shadow of axisymmetric, stationary and asymptotically flat black holes in the presence of plasma
• Observational signatures of Rotating compact objects in Plasma space-time
• Shadow cast by a rotating black hole with anisotropic matter
• Decoding Horizonless Spacetime: Plasma-Induced Features in a Rotating Wormhole Shadow
• Constraints on horizonless objects after the EHT observation of Sagittarius A*