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I'm referring to the infamous relativistic jet, which consists of matter being accelerated to near the speed of light, originating at the poles of the black hole:

enter image description here

But in the image of the black hole in the radio spectrum nothing of the sort is visible:

enter image description here

I would expect the relativistic jet to be one of the most prominent features since it's accelerated much more that other material orbiting the black hole.

Is it because the jet is more prominently visible in the visible and infrared spectrum than in the radio spectrum?

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  • $\begingroup$ I think you need to look into the scale of the images. The radio image is a massively "zoomed in" view of the centre of the bright dot at the top left of the other image. So most of the jet would be out of the picture. Whether there is a part that close to the SMBH and it's simply too dim, or too distorted, to see or whether the jet actually starts a bit further away, I don't know. $\endgroup$
    – Steve Linton
    Commented Apr 12, 2019 at 12:24
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    $\begingroup$ actually what is the scale difference on the two images? 10 million to 1 ? :O $\endgroup$
    – Fattie
    Commented Apr 12, 2019 at 19:59
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    $\begingroup$ I just answered this on Physics SE and feel reluctant to just copy it here. physics.stackexchange.com/questions/472910/… $\endgroup$
    – ProfRob
    Commented Apr 15, 2019 at 17:06

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