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Image credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (black hole)
A group of scientists has captured yet another amazing picture of Sagittarius A* — often shortened to Sgr A* — which is the supermassive black hole hidden at the heart of milky way galaxy.
The team used the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a massive telescope array that contains global network of radio observatories, to record the black hole’s magnetic fields in polarized light for the first time.
The amazing image shows some similarities with the recently-captured black hole lurking at the mid of the M87 galaxy, known as M87*, some 53 million light-years away from Earth. As such, the latest data reveals that the structure of Sgr A*’s magnetic fields could be a commonality among other supermassive black holes as well.
Recent observations of M87*, among them the very first image captured of a black hole, revealed the object spewing powerful jets of material into the surrounding environment.
The new picture of Sgr A* recommends that it could be releasing similar jets. That’s despite M87* being near about a thousand times more massive — a size that would permit it to effectively swallow up our whole solar system.
“What we’re watching now is that there are strong, twisted, and organized magnetic fields around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy,” said project co-lead and Harvard astrophysicist Sara Issaoun in the statement. “Along with Sgr A* having a strikingly likely polarization structure to that observed in the much greater and more strong M87* black hole, we’ve realized that powerful and ordered magnetic fields are critical to how black holes interact with the gas and matter around them.”
Examining objects such as supermassive black holes in polarized light permits us to map their magnetic field lines. These lines permit researchers to infer how matter gets gobbled up and discharged by black holes over time.
But getting to this point was anything but simple. Receiving the newest image of Sgr A* was exceedingly tough.
“Forming a polarized picture is like opening the book after you have only seen the cover,” described Geoffrey Bower, EHT project scientist and researcher at the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, in the statement. “Because Sgr A* travels around while we put efforts to capture its image, it was tough to make even the unpolarized image.”
The scientists are already curious about what new black hole mysteries future technologies could help us uncover.
But even the noticed similarities between M87* and Sgr A* alone are already permitting researchers to “refine our theoretical models and simulations, developing our knowledge of how matter is effected near the event horizon of a black hole,” as per EHT deputy project scientist and University of Naples professor Mariafelicia De Laurentis.
