IMAGING THE BLACK HOLE SILHOUETTE OF M87: IMPLICATIONS FOR JET FORMATION AND BLACK HOLE SPIN
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The silhouette cast by the horizon of the supermassive black hole in M87 can now be resolved with the emerging millimeter very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) capability. Despite being ∼2 × 10 3 times farther away than Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*; the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way and the primary target for horizon-scale imaging), M87's much larger black hole mass results in a horizon angular scale roughly half that of Sgr A*'s, providing another practical target for direct imaging. However, unlike Sgr A*, M87 exhibits a powerful radio jet, providing an opportunity to study jet-formation physics on horizon scales. We employ a simple, qualitatively correct force-free jet model to explore the expected high-resolution images of M87 at wavelengths of 1.3 mm and 0.87 mm (230 GHz and 345 GHz), for a variety of jet parameters. We show that future VLBI data will be able to constrain the size of the jet footprint, the jet collimation rate, and the black hole spin. Polarization will further probe the structure of the jet's magnetic field and its effect on the emitting gas. Horizon-scale imaging of M87 and Sgr A* will enable for the first time the empirical exploration of the relationship between the mass and spin of a black hole and the characteristics of the gas inflow/outflow around it.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".