What blows my mind is the fact that the jet emanating from M87 is thousands of lightyears across. This means you could live out your life on a planet orbiting a star near the jet and probably wouldn't notice anything out of the ordinary. The scale of that structure is absolutely mind-boggling.
Wouldn't that ray destroy any life on any nearby planet?
I think the poster above meant "wouldn't notice anything out of the ordinary until it's too late."
Too see the flare from the side bothers me the most. There's so much energy traveling away from us that it's lighting up space enough for the flare, again not pointing at us, to outshine the galaxy.
I just wish there were a higher resolution image than the one linked in that website. The original photos of M87 are so stunning and have such a cool story where they split the research group into two teams and they both came to the same conclusion about the discovery of the black hole. The photos that go along with the original discovery were my wallpaper forever because it just looks so awesome.
There is some amount of controversy of the EHT imaging process because there are pretty strong priors backed into it (like a lot of modern physics observations, e.g. LIGO)-- and at least one group suggests that you get a similar looking donut observation if you just feed noise into their imaging process.
something i've wondering, does a jet like this "push" the blackhole in any way?
It must right? (even if very slightly), otherwise it'd be in violation of Newton's 3rd law of motion.
The M87 jet can be optically imaged by amateurs too, here is an image I took using a 400mm (focal length) f/2.8 camera lens, a cooled cmos sensor, and many hours of observation: https://nt4tn.net/astro/M87jet.png
The image is a crop and contrast boost of this image: https://nt4tn.net/astro/virgo2.jpg
Light pollution renders such observations increasingly difficult, of course... but Marin's ban on outdoor advertising at least makes it possible here, unlike much of the bay area where stars can hardly be observed at all.