Strong Magnetic Fields Detected in Plasma Jets (IMAGE)

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Strong Magnetic Fields Detected in Plasma Jets

Caption

This is an artist's impression of how the black hole's magnetic field affects the polarization of light. The field rotates the polarization differently for different wavelengths. Studying this polarization rotation allows us to get information about the magnetic field at the closest accessible region to the event horizon of the black hole. This material relates to a paper that appeared in the April 17, 2015 issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by I. Martí-Vidal at Chalmers University of Technology in Onsala, Sweden, and colleagues was titled, 'A strong magnetic field in the jet base of a supermassive black hole.'

Credit

[Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/I. Marti-Vidal]

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