Question 1

True or false: The black hole in M87 is completely silent, emitting no radiation at all.

Accepted Answer

False. It emits powerful relativistic jets and radiation across the spectrum due to infalling matter, though the black hole itself is dark.

Question 2

True or false: The M87 black hole is located in the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

Accepted Answer

False. M87* resides in the giant elliptical galaxy M87, about 55 million light-years away in the Virgo cluster, not our own galaxy.

Question 3

True or false: M87's black hole has a mass equivalent to about 6.5 billion Suns.

Accepted Answer

True. Its supermassive mass of roughly 6.5 billion solar masses makes it one of the most massive black holes known.

Question 4

True or false: The M87 black hole was the first black hole ever directly imaged by humanity.

Accepted Answer

True. The Event Horizon Telescope captured the first image of M87* in 2019, revealing its shadow and glowing accretion disk.

Question 5

True or false: The image of M87* shows the black hole's event horizon as a bright ring.

Accepted Answer

False. The image shows a dark central shadow (the event horizon's silhouette) surrounded by a bright ring of hot plasma.

Question 6

True or false: The black hole in M87 was discovered in the 1990s using radio telescopes.

Accepted Answer

False. M87's supermassive black hole was inferred decades earlier from jet dynamics; its mass was measured via stellar motions in the 1990s.

Question 7

True or false: M87's black hole spins at nearly the speed of light, dragging spacetime around it.

Accepted Answer

True. Observations suggest M87* rotates rapidly, with its spin parameter near 0.9, causing extreme frame-dragging effects.

Question 8

True or false: M87's black hole is larger than the entire orbit of Pluto.

Accepted Answer

True. With a Schwarzschild radius of about 120 astronomical units, M87* easily encompasses Pluto's orbit (roughly 40 AU).

M87 black hole Trivia Questions