![]() "We have two completely different types of galaxies and two very different black hole masses, but close to the edge of these black holes they look amazingly similar," said astronomer Sera Markoff of the EHT Science Council at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. This, the researchers said, means we can make certain inferences about black holes. This could help us understand all sorts of black hole mysteries, such as how accretion works, how jets are launched, even whether general relativity has accurately described the extreme space-time in the vicinity of a black hole.įascinatingly, the two black holes appear very similar. Because it's not blazing with light like a more active black hole, we might be able to see the environment around it a little more clearly, which in turn might give us a better window into event horizon physics. Sgr A*'s quiescence may have made it more challenging to image, but that very characteristic makes it extraordinary as an object of study. Illustration showing the anatomy of a supermassive black hole. That's because the material in the space around them emits light, and the magnetic fields of the black holes can accelerate jets into intergalactic space, both of which can tell us about the black hole itself. The supermassive black holes that we usually study are active, like M87*. Entire galaxies swirl around them they control star formation, even outside their own galaxies. ![]() They are, however, major drivers in the evolution of the cosmos. We don't know how they manage to get so big – Sgr A* is actually pretty tiny for one of these behemoths – or how they formed in the first place, at the dawn of time. Supermassive black holes are a cosmic mystery. Scientists are going to be chewing over the incredible results for some time to come. The bar graphs show the relative number of images belonging to each cluster. The images were grouped into four classes based on similar features, which you can see at the bottom of the image above. The achievement comes three years after the collaboration released the first image of a black hole's shadow ever obtained – a supermassive black hole named M87*, clocking in at 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun, at the center of a galaxy 55 million light-years away. "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." "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 of Academia Sinica in Taipei. ![]() That image at the top of the screen – looking like a glorious blurry orange donut – is the dust around and shadow of Sgr A* itself, seen by humanity for the very first time, thanks to the hard work of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration. We've been able to infer its presence, and measure it, based on the movements of objects around it, but never had we seen the object itself. And one of these is the VERA radio astronomy survey, conducted by the Japanese VERA collaboration.Contained in that dark heart, around which the entire galaxy revolves, is a supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A*, clocking in at roughly 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun. It's actually much farther away, which means that the explosion was brighter and more energetic, and requires a new explanation, since previous analyses were performed under the assumption it was relatively low energy.īut we're getting better at calculating those distances, with surveys using the best available technology and techniques working hard to refine our three-dimensional maps of the Milky Way, a field known as astrometry. ![]() This means that it's neither as large nor as bright as we thought.Īnother is the object CK Vulpeculae, a star that exploded 350 years ago. ![]() A good recent example of this is the red giant star Betelgeuse, which turned out to be closer to Earth than previous measurements suggested. It's relatively easy to map the two-dimensional coordinates of stars and other cosmic objects, but the distances to those objects is a lot harder to figure out.Īnd distances are important - they help us determine the intrinsic brightness of objects. It's a problem that has long devilled our understanding of space phenomena. ![]()
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