In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope stunned the world with the first-ever image of a black hole — the shadow of M87*, a monster six billion times the mass of the Sun, sitting 55 million light-years away.

Now, new EHT observations have revealed something even stranger. Between 2017 and 2021, the polarization patterns of light around M87* unexpectedly flipped.

But what does that mean?

Polarization is the orientation of light waves, and in astronomy, it acts like a fingerprint of magnetic fields. In 2017, the magnetic fields around M87* spiraled in one direction. By 2018, they stabilized. And by 2021, they had completely reversed, spiraling the opposite way.

This shocking flip tells scientists that the plasma swirling near the event horizon isn’t calm or stable. It’s turbulent, dynamic, and constantly shifting, driven by powerful magnetic forces.

For the first time, astronomers also detected faint signatures of the jet base — the launching point of a colossal beam of particles blasting from the black hole at nearly the speed of light. These jets regulate how galaxies grow and evolve, distributing energy across cosmic scales.

And here’s the kicker: while the ring of the black hole has remained the same size, exactly as Einstein’s theory predicted, the changing polarization shows us that the environment around the event horizon is far more complex than we imagined.

This discovery pushes our models to the limit — and brings us one step closer to understanding how black holes shape the universe itself.