Black Hole

Black hole: First picture of Milky Way monster
This is the gargantuan black hole that lives at the centre of our galaxy, pictured for the very first
time.
Known as Sagittarius A*, the object is a staggering four million times the mass of our Sun.
What you see is a central dark region where the hole resides, circled by the light coming from
super-heated gas accelerated by immense gravitational forces.
For scale, the ring has diameter of about 60 million km (40 million miles).
To put that in context, Mercury, the innermost planet in our Solar System, orbits between roughly
40 million km and 70 million km from the Sun (or between 25 million miles and 45 million miles).
Fortunately, this monster is a long, long way away - some 26,000 light-years in the distance - so
there's no possibility of us ever coming to any danger.
The image was produced by an international team called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)
collaboration.
It's their second such image after releasing in 2019 a picture of the giant black hole at the heart of
another galaxy called Messier 87, or M87. That object was more than a thousand times bigger at
6.5 billion times the mass of our Sun.
"But this new image is special because it's our supermassive black hole," said Prof Heino Falcke,
one of the European pioneers behind the EHT project.
"This is in 'our backyard', and if you want to understand black holes and how they work, this is the
one that will tell you because we see it in intricate detail," the German-Dutch scientist from
Radboud University Nijmegen told BBC News.
 M87: First ever black hole image released
 History-making black hole seen to do a shimmy
 Twisting jet observed at supermassive black hole
What is a black hole?
 A black hole is a region of space where matter has collapsed in on itself
 The gravitational pull is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape
 Black holes will emerge from the explosive demise of certain large stars
 But some are truly huge and are billions of times the mass of our Sun
 How these monsters - found at galaxy centres - formed is unknown
 But it's clear they energise the galaxy and will influence its evolution
The picture is a technical tour de force. It has to be.
At a distance of 26,000 light-years from Earth, Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short, is a tiny pinprick
on the sky. To discern such a target requires incredible resolution.
The EHT's trick is a technique called very long baseline array interferometry (VLBI).
Essentially, this combines a network of eight widely spaced radio antennas to mimic a telescope
the size of our planet.
This arrangement enables the EHT to cut an angle on the sky that is measured in
microarcseconds. EHT team members talk about a sharpness of vision akin to being able to see a
bagel on the surface of the Moon.
Even then, atomic clocks, smart algorithms and countless hours of supercomputing are needed to
construct an image from several petabytes (1 PB equals one million gigabytes) of gathered data.
The way a black hole bends, or lenses, light means there is nothing to see but a "shadow", but the
brilliance of the matter screaming around this darkness and spreading out into a circle, known as
an accretion disc, betrays where the object is.
If you compare the new image to the previous one of M87, you may wonder what's different. But
there are key distinctions.
"Because Sagittarius A* is a much smaller black hole - it's around a thousand times smaller - its
ring structure changes on timescales that are a thousand times faster," explained team member
Dr Ziri Younsi from University College London, UK. "It's very dynamic. The 'hotspots' you see in
the ring move around from day to day."
This is very apparent from the simulations the team has produced of what you would see if you
could somehow take yourself to the centre of our galaxy and view the scene with eyes sensitive
at radio frequencies.
The super-heated, excited gas - or plasma - in the ring is travelling around the black hole at a
significant fraction of light-speed (300,000km/s, or about 190,000 miles per second). The brighter
regions are likely places where material is moving towards us and where its light emission is being
energised, or "doppler boosted", as a consequence.
These rapid changes in the vicinity of Sgr A* are part of the reason why it has taken so much
longer to produce an image than for M87. Interpretation of the data has been a tougher
challenge.
The telescope observations for both black holes were actually acquired during the same period in
early 2017, but M87, at its greater size and distance of 55 million light-years, looks static by
comparison.
Scientists have already begun to deploy the measurements in the new image to test the physics
we currently use to describe black holes. So far, what they see is entirely consistent with the
equations set out by Einstein in his theory of gravity, of general relativity.
We've suspected for several decades that a supermassive black hole lives at the centre of the
galaxy. 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)?
But, interestingly, when the Nobel Prize committee honoured astronomers Reinhard Genzel and
Andrea Ghez with its physics award in 2020 for their work on Sgr A*, the citation spoke only of "a
supermassive compact object". It was wriggle room in case some other exotic phenomenon
turned out to be the explanation.
There can be no doubt now, however.
Come this August, the new super space telescope, James Webb, will turn its eye on Sgr A*. The
$10bn observatory won't have the resolution to directly image the black hole and its accretion
ring, but it will bring new capability to the study of the environment around the black hole with its
incredibly sensitive infrared instruments.
Astronomers will be studying in unprecedented detail the behaviour and the physics of hundreds
of stars whipping around the black hole. 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.
"Every time we get a new facility that can take a sharper image of the Universe, we do our best to
train it on the galactic centre, and we inevitably learn something fantastic," said Dr Jessica Lu, the
assistant professor from the University of California, Berkeley, US, who will lead the Webb
campaign.

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Black hole: First picture of Milky Way monster

There can be no doubt now, however.

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