Magnetic flux around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy can be seen in the image taken with the Event Horizon Telescope. The view is very similar to the image of the black hole M87* taken in 2021, which shows the famous object in polarized light.
The Event Horizon Telescope was created in 2009 in international cooperation, and its purpose is to make more precise observations of black holes than before and map event horizons around black holes. The observations mainly focus on two objects, M87* at the center of the Messier 87 Galaxy and Sgr A* hidden in the Milky Way.
The Event Horizon Telescope is not actually a conventional telescope, but a virtual planet-sized observatory, which collects images by communicating and working with telescopes in different parts of the Earth.
The system includes the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), and the submillimeter array. Telescopes are like pieces of a broken mirror, from which the final image is created – It is to explain ETH astrophysicist Shepard Doleman in 2019 after publishing the first image of a black hole (M87*). About the same object in 2021 Posted A new image shows the magnetic field around a supermassive black hole thanks to the observation of polarized light. Light becomes polarized when it passes through different filters (this is also used in polarizing sunglasses), and plasma becomes polarized when a magnetic field acts on it.
Similar to M87*, the black hole Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way was also observed using the Event Horizon telescope in 2017 during a week-long operation in April, and as a result of this work, a polarized image of the Sr star was obtained. A*, which was published on 27 March, has also been completed. The image shows the “vortex” of the magnetic field around the black hole, and according to the image, this phenomenon is very similar to the arrangement of the magnetic field observed in the case of M87*. From this, the researchers concluded that a strong magnetic field may be a common feature of supermassive black holes, and the discovery also raises the possibility that a black hole in the Milky Way Galaxy could emit a jet (a beam of radiation), even if it is not possible to capture this in images. . Very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) data were collected in two polarization bands, two frequency bands, and in a multi-step process processed.
With the Eseményhorizon Teleszkóp, new observations of the black hole Sagittarius A* will be made in April this year, and the quality of the images is constantly improving as more and more telescopes join the EHT. Researchers a description Sooner or later, even “cinema” may be born from the black hole of the Milky Way system, and one day the plane hidden in the footage may be discovered.
(Photo: S. Ayson/EHT Collaboration, Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration et al. 2024 ApJL 964 L25)
