There is a giant at the center of our galaxy.
It’s a massive black hole called Sagittarius A* (pronounced “Sagittarius star”) that weighs 4.3 million suns. After taking unprecedented images of the object in 2022, astronomers have now captured an extraordinary new view of the black hole, revealing its powerful twisting magnetic field. Scientists captured the black hole using polarized light, which involves using filters to see different features of distant objects. (Magnetic fields are generated by moving charged particles.)
“What we’re seeing now is a strong, twisted, organized magnetic field near the black hole at the center of the Milky Way,” said Sarah Isaacs, Einstein Fellow at the NASA Hubble Fellowship Program at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics. (Sara Issaoun) said. The Smithsonian, which co-led the research effort, said in a statement.
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Black holes have such a strong gravitational pull that not even light can escape—because they are incredibly dense objects. The greater the mass of an object, the stronger its gravity. If the Earth were (hypothetically) crushed into a black hole, it would be less than an inch in diameter. So you might be wondering, If a black hole doesn’t emit light, how can we see it?
While we can’t see the actual object, we can see material – extremely hot gas – swirling around the black hole, called an “accretion disk.” Some of this matter will inevitably fall into the black hole, never to return; Much of this would be ejected back into the universe, because black holes are not efficient consumers of galactic matter. The point where the rays end at the center of the image is the point of no return, called the “event horizon.” This is the final boundary between space and black holes.
Mix and match speed of light
In the orange accretion disk, those vivid lines show the twisted structure of the magnetic field in the ring-shaped accretion disk. Ultimately, these magnetic fields can push jets of material away from the black hole’s rotating disk of gas.
“By imaging polarized light from hot gas near a black hole, we can directly infer the structure and strength of the magnetic field in the streams of gas and material that the black hole feeds and ejects,” said Harvard black hole researcher Angelo Ricarte ) said. Initiative researchers who also co-led the study said in a statement.
New images of Sagittarius A* reveal the black hole’s twisted magnetic field.
Image source: Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration
New black hole research published March 27 in peer-reviewed scientific journal Astrophysical Journal Communications.
Importantly, astronomers found that the black holes at the centers of Sagittarius A* and M87 galaxies (which are 1,000 times more massive than Sagittarius A*) have similar structures: They both contain the same type of magnetic structure in their spinning disks, despite huge differences in size. This is probably a common feature of most black holes – places that remain mysterious to us but gradually become less opaque.
To capture the rare image of a black hole (only two of them have been imaged), scientists used the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a collection of radio telescopes dotted around the Earth. Working together, they created a planet-sized array equivalent to a virtual telescope. These black hole images are expected to become more detailed and impressive in the coming years. Scientists are adding more telescopes to the EHT, called Next Generation Event Horizon Telescopes, capable of taking real-time movies of these cosmic behemoths.