![]() ![]() “These unprecedented observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very center of our galaxy, and offer new insights on how these giant black holes interact with their surroundings.” The EHT team’s results are being published today (May 12, 2022) in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “We were stunned by how well the size of the ring agreed with predictions from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity,” said EHT Project Scientist Geoffrey Bower from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei. Minniti DSS, Nogueras-Lara et al., Schoedel, NACO, GRAVITY Collaboration, EHT Collaboration (Music: Azul Cobalto) The black hole is shown by a dark central region called a shadow, surrounded by a ring of luminous gas and dust. Finally, we arrive at Sgr A*, the first image of which has been captured by the EHT collaboration. The stars here have been observed with ESO’s Very Large Telescope and ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer for decades, the black hole’s immense gravitational pull distorting the orbits of the stars closest to it. Beginning with a broad view of the Milky Way, we dive into the dense clouds of gas and dust at our galactic center. Watch as this video sequence zooms into the black hole (Sgr A*) at the center of our galaxy. The new view captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole, which is four million times more massive than our Sun. Located in the Atacama Desert in Chile, ALMA is the most sensitive of all the observatories in the EHT array, and ESO is a co-owner of ALMA on behalf of its European Member States.Ĭredit: ESO/José Francisco Salgado (), EHT CollaborationĪlthough we cannot see the black hole itself, because it is completely dark, glowing gas around it reveals a telltale signature: a dark central region (called a shadow) surrounded by a bright ring-like structure. Highlighted in the box is the image of Sagittarius A* taken by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration. This core has a sub-structure that can only be broken down and resolved at short wavelengths, the brightness of which suggests the energy of the jet is dominated by the magnetic field.This image shows the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) looking up at the Milky Way as well as the location of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at our galactic center. This revealed a bright feature located on the southern end of the jet that is associated with a core from which the jet starts. The EHT looked at this quasar in polarized and unpolarized light allowing the researchers to investigate the magnetic field structure in the vicinity of the black hole and the innermost part of the jet. The quasar at the heart of NRAO 530 is also classified as a blazar, a type of quasar that is orientated in such a way that the jets it blasts out are pointed directly at Earth. Quite how the magnetic fields of quasars form these jets is shrouded in mystery. ![]() These jets can stretch out from quasars for hundreds of thousands of light-years. Here the particles are collimated into bright, thin, jets that blast out at nearly the speed of light. The magnetic fields of quasars also funnel particles to the poles of their supermassive black hole components. These black holes greedily feed on the material that surrounds them, but not all of this material falls past the event horizon. This causes quasars to brighten violently, but this isn’t the only source of radiation from quasars. ![]() Quasars are powerful sources of radiation because the powerful gravitational influence of their central black holes, which can be millions or even billions of times more massive than the sun, accelerates material to near-light speed and heats it. How black holes light up their galactic homesīlack holes themselves don’t emit light and actually capture light behind a one-way surface called an event horizon, so it may seem strange that they can power such a luminous phenomenon. ![]()
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