A black hole’s ejection recorded

Using powerful radio telescopes, scientists have captured a supermassive black hole just as it was belching out a jet of supercharged particles, offering a first look at how these cosmic jets are formed, the scientific team reported Thursday in the journal Nature.

Supermassive black holes are believed to form the core of many galaxies, and astronomers have long suspected they eject jets of particles at nearly the speed of light.

A kind of supermassive black hole known as a blazar was suspected of spewing out a pair of forceful streams of plasma 950 million light years from Earth.

Using the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Long Baseline Array, the team imaged this charged material winding in corkscrew fashion out of the supermassive black hole, behaving just as astronomers had predicted.