The cylindrical jet base of M87 within 100$μ\rm{as}$ of the central engine

Abstract

A recent article on high-resolution 86 GHz observations with the Global Millimeter VLBI Array, the phased Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, and the Greenland Telescope describes the detection of a limb-brightened cylindrical jet, $25 μ\rm{as}< z< 100 μ\rm{as}$, where $z$ is the axial displacement from the supermassive black hole in the sky plane. It was shown to be much wider and much more collimated than 2D simulations of electromagnetic (Blandford-Znajek) jets from the event horizon predicted. This was an unanticipated discovery. The claimed detection of a jet connected to the accretion flow provides a direct observational constraint on the geometry and physics of the jet launching region for the first time in any black hole jetted system. This landmark detection warrants further analysis. This Letter focuses on the most rudimentary properties, the shape and size of the source of the detected jet emission, the determination of which is not trivial due to line-of-sight effects. Simple thick-walled cylindrical shell models for the source were analyzed to constrain the thickness of the jet wall. The analysis indicates a tubular jet source with a radius $R\approx 144 μ\rm{as}\approx 38M$ and that the tubular jet walls have a width $W \approx 36μ\rm{as} \approx 9.5 M$, where $M$ is the geometrized mass of the black hole (a volume comparable to that of the interior cavity). The observed cylindrical jet connects continuously to the highly limb-brightened jet (previously described as a thick-walled tubular jet) that extends to $z> 0.65$ mas, and the two are likely in fact the same outflow (i.e., from the same central engine).