Two postdocs at the Black Hole Initiative, Freek Roelofs and Angelo Ricarte, have been involved in some groundbreaking results released today. Their measurements demonstrate the presence of spiraling light – or circular polarization – providing more conclusive evidence of strong magnetic fields around the supermassive black hole in the elliptical galaxy M87.
The two papers describing these results have just been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. One of the papers was led by Freek Roelofs, a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), a part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA). The other paper is by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. Several other people, currently or formerly at the BHI, also collaborated on both papers.
Read the full press release by the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.
Image Credit: George Wong (IAS)
