Black hole

On Thursday, May 12, 2022, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team of astronomers presented the 1st direct image taken of the Milky Way galaxy's supermassive ...

So we may actually have the influence of the jet or other outflows from the central black hole – it’s not only acreting; it’s also putting stuff out there – and that might influence the whole evolution of the galaxy. The question is what role it had in the formation of our galaxy, and in the fact it looks like it does now. While the potential influence of the hypothetical jets perhaps produced by Sgr A* today is relatively mild, that wasn’t so in the Milky Way’s distant past. And it’s curious that we’re in a period right now where everything is very quiet, and probably in some way a jet of some description, some enormous eruptive event, is responsible for that. It is a myth, the experts explained, that supermassive central black holes play a role in holding their galaxies together. Dr. Sera Markoff, co-chair of the EHT Science Council and a professor of theoretical astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands: I would love to take that one, because I’ve been trying to find jets at Sgr A* for a long time. But the sphere of influence of the black hole itself on its surrounding is not very large. Ziri Younsi, UKRI Stephen Hawking Fellow, University College London: I just wanted quickly to add to that about the jet stuff, because I think it’s really interesting. Emission jets from black holes originate along their spin axes, revealing why the orientation of Sgr A* may be important to understand galactic development. And, what is the nature of the particles ejected? So we have not found an exact model which would explain everything, so we have best-bet models and best-bet regions. During the conference, Dr. Christian Fromm, EHT’s Sgr A* Theory Working Group Coordinator, described the black hole as being face-on to Earth. EarthSky.org’s question sought elaboration on that statement.

It was the first-ever image of a black hole -- and it revealed the violence of the cosmic beast. This chaotic void, dubbed M87*, spews out a jet of light and ...

"We see that only a trickle of material is actually making it all the way to the black hole," Johnson said. Though it's a simulation of a binary black hole system, notice how when the blue black hole is behind the orange black hole, you can see the entirety of the blue one on the top and bottom of the orange one. Thus, he says, the black hole is inefficient. And, on the note of general relativity, the reason some parts of the light ring are brighter than others is because of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. It's actually associated with the far end of the event horizon and part of a Saturn-like ring around the whole object. We can basically see the far end of the event horizon, and essentially all angles of the horizon there, too. Every black hole has one of these, and this is the bit that probably gives black holes their reputation of being "black." "Light that is close enough to be swallowed by it eventually crosses its horizon and leaves behind just a dark void in the center." It was the first-ever image of a black hole -- and it revealed the violence of the space-borne beast. The event horizon is basically the boundary between our universe and the elusive insides of the void. If anything from that disk falls within the Schwarzschild radius, aka beyond the event horizon, it's lost to the black hole universe. In the EHT images, this alternate reality-esque, spherical space between the singularity and event horizon is signified by the black circles.

Now that the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration has released its picture of the Milky Way's black hole, the team is focusing on making movies of the two ...

Finally, another major goal of the EHT collaboration is to make videos of Sgr A* and M87* as the material around them moves and changes over time. “Those knots tend to line up with the directions in which we have more telescopes,” said EHT researcher Feryal Özel at the University of Arizona during the press event. The images of Sgr A* and M87* were both assembled from data gathered in 2017, but there have since been two more observation periods with extra telescopes added to the collaboration’s original eight-telescope network.

Discovering something for the second time doesn't usually have scientists jump out of their seats with excitement. But that's exactly what happened in the ...

"If you looked at the source one day versus the next, or one year versus the following year, how would that change, and how much light would it emit in different wavelengths?" "If you were in space looking at the black hole, you would see absolutely nothing," Özel said. It took a globe-spanning collaboration, several years, petabytes of data and more involved algorithms than had been dedicated to most scientific endeavors before, to analyze and confirm the final image of Sgr A*. A black hole 1,000 times smaller in mass than another will have a very similar image that will just be 1,000 times smaller. On Thursday, the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration presented the second image of such an object—this time of a black hole located at the center of our own Milky Way. This contributed to the groundwork for an Earth-sized observatory that is now the Event Horizon Telescope.

On May 12, 2022, astronomers on the Event Horizon Telescope team released an image of a black hole called Sagittarius A* that lies at the center of the ...

For the last few decades, astronomers have thought that there are massive black holes at the center of almost every galaxy. Black holes are the only objects in existence that only answer to one law of nature – gravity. The team used eight radio telescopes spread across the globe to collect data on the black hole over the course of five nights in 2017. They are far away and shrouded by the gas and dust that clogs the center of galaxies. From where Sagittarius A* sits, 26,000 light years away at the center of the Milky Way, only 1 in 10 billion photons of visible light can reach Earth – most are absorbed by gas in the way. But astronomers think there are supermassive black holes at the center of nearly all galaxies.

It took eight radio telescopes all over Earth working in perfect harmony to do it, but scientists successfully snapped the first photo of the black hole at ...

“We live out in the suburbs [in a spiral arm of the galaxy]. Things are calm out here.” Dr. Bower said it is probably more typical of what’s at the center of most galaxies, “just sitting there doing very little.” The same telescope group released the first black hole image in 2019. The picture also confirms Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity: The black hole is precisely the size that Einstein’s equations dictate. Astronomers worked with data collected in 2017 to get the new images. Getting a good image was a challenge; previous efforts found the black hole too jumpy.

During the first billion years of the universe, winds blown by supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies were much more frequent and more powerful ...

"The large investment of time dedicated to observing these objects and the unique capacities of X-shooter in terms of efficiency, wavelength coverage and resolving power have allowed us to obtain very good quality spectra which enabled this interesting result." "Unlike what we observe in the universe closer to us, we discovered that black hole winds in the young universe are very frequent, have high speeds up to 17 percent of the speed of light, and inject large amounts of energy into their host galaxy." Our observations enabled us to identify this mechanism in the black hole winds produced when the universe was 0.5 to 1 billion years old." The energy injected by winds would have been thus able to halt further matter accretion onto the black hole, slowing down its growth and kicking off a "common evolution" phase between the black hole and its host galaxy. During the first billion years of the universe, winds blown by supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies were much more frequent and more powerful than those observed in today's galaxies, some 13 billion years later. The host galaxies of these quasars were observed around cosmic dawn, when the universe was between 500 million and 1 billion years old.

And because the Event Horizon Telescope is already an array the size of Earth, moving its observatories farther apart is quite a challenge. Scientists have ...

"This image is actually one of the sharpest images you've ever seen," Bouman said. But for today, the sharpness of the new Sagittarius A* image is as best as we can make it for now given the amount of data involved. So much data was involved that EHT investigators had to ship hard drives to one another for the science work, rather than streaming over the Internet.

"We finally have the first look at our Milky Way black hole, Sagittarius A*," an international team of astrophysicists and researchers from the Event ...

"Perhaps more importantly, the one in M87 launches a powerful jet that extends as far as the edge of that galaxy. In the case of Sgr A*, scientists have previously observed stars orbiting around the Milky Way's center. "The one in M87 is accumulating matter at a significantly faster rate than Sgr A*," she said.

An image of what looks like a glowing orange donut is actually the first picture of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, ...

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"It's the dawn of a new era of black hole physics," the Event Horizon Telescope team said as it released the first-ever image of supermassive black hole in the ...

"Perhaps more importantly, the one in M87 launches a powerful jet that extends as far as the edge of that galaxy. "The one in M87 is accumulating matter at a significantly faster rate than Sgr A*," she said. In the case of Sgr A*, scientists have previously observed stars orbiting around the Milky Way's center. It took several years to refine our image and confirm what we had, but we prevailed." Black holes have long been a source of public fascination, but they also pose notorious challenges to researchers, mainly because their gravitational fields are so strong that they either bend light or prevent it from escaping entirely. The black hole is often referred to as Sgr A*, pronounced sadge ay star.

Pioneering Harvard-led global collaborative unveils latest portrait, bolstering understanding of relativity, gravity.

The project will involve designing new ultra-high-speed instrumentation and a plan to double the number of radio dishes in the EHT array that will allow scientists “to create an Earth-sized motion picture camera” that “will bring black holes to vibrant life,” said Doeleman, who also leads the ngEHT project. On Monday at 5:15 p.m. in the Harvard Science Center, Hall C, there will be a special public event with members of Harvard’s EHT team discussing the results. We’re hoping to add these new telescopes around the world and be able to really dig into those sharp features and to be able to see these high-resolution movies.” It also marks a monumental collaborative achievement for the EHT, made up of more than 300 researchers from 80 institutes around the globe and 11 observatories. The averaged image retains features more commonly seen in the varied images and suppresses features that appeared less frequently. “For Sgr A*, you have a toddler running around and you’re trying to get their portrait with the long-exposure camera. M87 is 55 million light-years away in the Virgo Galaxy cluster and has a mass about 6.5 billion times that of our sun. “This material scatters the light that we observe from Sgr A*. It’s like looking at something through frosted glass.” The researchers produced the picture with observations from the Event Horizon Telescope, a worldwide network of radio telescopes that link together to form a single Earth-sized virtual instrument. Sgr A*, on the other hand, is on the small side. The way the light bends around the dark center, known as the event horizon, shows the object’s powerful gravity, which is four million times that of our sun. An international team of astronomers led by scientists at the Center for Astrophysics

Astronomers reveal the first ever image of the black hole at the core of our galaxy.

They'll even be looking to see if there are some star-sized black holes in the region, and for evidence of concentrated clumps of invisible, or dark, matter. What else could produce gravitational forces that accelerate nearby stars through space at speeds of up 24,000km/s (for comparison our Sun glides around the galaxy at a sedate 230km/s, or 140 miles per second)? The mass of a black hole determines the size of its accretion disc, or emission ring. So far, what they see is entirely consistent with the equations set out by Einstein in his theory of gravity, of general relativity. The 'hotspots' you see in the ring move around from day to day." This arrangement enables the EHT to cut an angle on the sky that is measured in microarcseconds.

"We finally have the first look at our Milky Way black hole, Sagittarius A*," an international team of astrophysicists and researchers from the Event ...

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Nearly all galaxies, including our own, are believed to have these giant black holes at their center, where light and matter cannot escape, ...

“We live out in the suburbs (in a spiral arm of the galaxy). Things are calm out here.” The same telescope group released the first black hole image in 2019. The picture also confirms Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity: The black hole is precisely the size that Einstein’s equations dictate. The Milky Way black hole is called Sagittarius A(asterisk), near the border of Sagittarius and Scorpius constellations. Getting a good image was a challenge; previous efforts found the black hole too jumpy. Astronomers believe nearly all galaxies, including our own, have these giant black holes at their bustling and crowded center, where light and matter cannot escape, making it extremely hard to get images of them.

Astronomers announced on Thursday that they had pierced the veil of darkness and dust at the center of our Milky Way galaxy to capture the first picture of ...

Dr. Doeleman’s new goal is to expand the network to include more antennas and gain enough coverage to produce a movie of the Sagittarius black hole. Sagittarius A*, the black hole in the Milky Way galaxy, was a harder target. The telescope is named after the point of no return around a black hole. Astronomers have been trying to sharpen the acuity of their telescopes to resolve the shadow of that orange. But ionized electrons and protons in interstellar space scatter the radio waves into a blur that obscures details of the source. The team scored its first triumph in April 2019, when it presented a picture of the M87 black hole. Their discovery led physicists and astronomers to take seriously the notion that black holes existed. For their achievement, Dr. Genzel and Dr. Ghez won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020. Most of that matter falls into the black hole, but some is squirted out by enormous pressures and magnetic fields. “This is an extraordinary verification of Einstein’s general theory of relativity,” said Michael Johnson, a team member and also of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center. What gave rise to such behemoths of nothingness is a mystery. The image, released in six simultaneous news conferences in Washington, and around the globe, showed a lumpy doughnut of radio emission framing empty space.

"For decades, astronomers have wondered what lies at the heart of our galaxy, pulling stars into tight orbits through its immense gravity," Michael Johnson, ...

"This image is a testament to what we can accomplish, when as a global research community, we bring our brightest minds together to make the seemingly impossible, possible," National Science Foundation Director Sethuraman Panchanathan said in a statement. Bouman and EHT member Antonio Fuentes, who will join Caltech as a postdoctoral researcher in October, are developing methods that will allow them to stitch images of the black hole together to reflect this motion. It is believed that black holes exist at the center of most galaxies, acting like an engine that powers them. Taking the Sagittarius A* image was like capturing a photo of a grain of salt in New York City using a camera in Los Angeles, according to California Institute of Technology researchers. This means the brightness and pattern of the gas around Sgr A* was changing rapidly as the EHT Collaboration was observing it -- a bit like trying to take a clear picture of a puppy quickly chasing its tail." If we could see this in our night sky, the black hole would appear to be the same size as a doughnut sitting on the moon.

The Event Horizon Telescope has obtained the first image of the long-theorized supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

As countless science and general news outlets have reported today, the image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, ...

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