The closest ever image of a violent jet spewing out of a supermassive black hole has been revealed.
The impressive picture has been brought to us by the same team who published the historic first image of a black hole last year.
Jet streams shooting from black holes are thought to be made of excited gas or plasma.
The one in this image is thought to have been moving at almost the speed of light.
This scene, featuring a black hole at the top of the image, was actually in the background of the original target.
It was captured as the scientists studied an area in space known 3C 279.
3C 279 is a region that experts refer to as a quasar.
A quasar is a very bright center of a galaxy that emits a large amount of energy.
Some people suspect they are powered by supermassive black holes and may even represent an evolutionary stage in the formation of galaxies.
The black hole in the image above is located in a quasar 5.5 billion light-years away from Earth.
The scientists observed it when they studied the region to learn more about the behavior of space around black holes.
They actually did this back in April 2017 with the help of the Event Horizon Telescope.
This newly revealed black hole image surprised the team because they thought a jet coming from a black hole would be straight but this one seems to bend at the base.
It also has some features that can be seen perpendicular to the jet.
Jae-Young Kim, leader of the analysis, said: “We knew that every time you open a new window to the Universe you can find something new.
“Here, where we expected to find the region where the jet forms by going to the sharpest image possible, we find a kind of perpendicular structure.
“This is like finding a very different shape by opening the smallest Matryoshka [Russian nesting] doll.
This research has been published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
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