Black hole

A supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* (yes, the asterisk is part of it!) sits at the center of the Milky Way. Now, for the first time, we can.

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.” It’s a triumph of computational physics.” These simulations were run predominantly on TACC’s Frontera system, a 23.5 Linpack petaflops Dell system that ranks 13th on the most recent Top500 list. A supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* (yes, the asterisk is part of it!) sits at the center of the Milky Way. Now, for the first time, we can see it. To help, the researchers turned to supercomputing, building the largest-ever simulation library of black holes. The EHT array captured an enormous amount of data of this moving target, but understanding that data and distilling it into a legible image was another matter entirely.

The Event Horizon Telescope has now produced images of two surprisingly different supermassive black holes: the one in the center of a galaxy called M87 and ...

"Only a trickle of material is actually making it all the way to the black hole." Although the material surrounding Sagittarius A* is moving around the event horizon inconveniently fast, our supermassive black hole nonetheless offers a much tamer environment near its surface than M87* does. "Imaging Sagittarius A* was a bit of a messier story than imaging M87*," Bouman said. And the challenge of Sagittarius A* was evident as scientists analyzed the data the EHT gathered as well. That's the monster hiding within M87, also known as M87*. This black hole is farther away from Earth, of course, but it's also much larger, and material moves around its event horizon at a more leisurely pace. In particular, the two black holes differ in how difficult it is to image material moving around its boundary, or event horizon.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The international Event Horizon Telescope collaboration has snapped a second image of a black hole—this time at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy.

The UArizona faculty members working to understand black holes have been tackling this challenge for decades and were part of the research groups that identified the black hole at the center of the Milky Way and the one at the center of Messier 87 galaxy as ideal targets of study. The test that was hardest for the models to beat was the variability, which measures how much the black hole changes from moment to moment. To simulate these radio waves and create images, scientists trace the path that light traveled back to the black hole, again using supercomputers. EHT scientists can compare each simulated image with the actual black hole image to find a match. The first image, of the black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, was released in 2019. With this resource, the team was able to finish the full library of simulations in two months. To create the simulation library, the EHT Collaboration needed 80 million CPU hours, or processing time, which is the equivalent of running 2,000 laptops at full speed for a full year. The simulation process involves using supercomputers to solve what's called general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic—or GRMHD—equations, which reveal the movement of material and energy around black holes within dramatically warped space and time. The electrons are 100 times cooler than the ions in the plasma, and the disk rotates in the same direction the black hole spins. This library is made up thousands of data sets—containing information about how the plasma interacts with magnetic fields around black holes—and millions of simulated images. The international Event Horizon Telescope collaboration has snapped a second image of a black hole—this time at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. The latest image, released Thursday, shows the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, called Sagittarius A*.

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.

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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Yale's Mislav Baloković talks about the Event Horizon Telescope's new image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

The image of the Sgr A* black hole is based on observations of a constantly and rapidly changing target seen through about half a galaxy's worth of turbulently stirring hot gas, and I am amazed that despite this the EHT was able to arrive at results that are as robust as they are. We are also actively searching for the next-best SMBH candidate for imaging at the event horizon scale, as well as looking into optimizing the EHT array to enhance its capabilities in the future. On the scientific side, although having the image is certainly important, a lot of the important information that leads to new discoveries is in other forms of data. Sgr A* also boasts the status of “our black hole,” just like our star, our planet, our solar system, and our galaxy, which makes it special and I think will contribute to its popularity. In comparison with the giant SMBH in the galaxy M87, whose image the EHT published three years ago, Sgr A* is much smaller and situated in a more typical galaxy. In a May 12 announcement, EHT researchers presented the first image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Earth’s home galaxy.

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.

The first snapshot of the cosmic monster in our galaxy opens up more questions than answers, the ABC's science reporters find.

While the EHT was gazing at the black hole, three X-ray telescopes kept an eye on it too. Altogether, that’s as much data as ~40000 lifetimes worth of selfies! They spotted X-ray flares - or outbursts - from Sgr A*. Signs of a jet? "That's why this one is special to a lot of people. Each bank of hard drives holds 64 terabytes of raw data. "We really need to make a movie of our black hole to start to understand a lot of the questions [we still have]," Dr Dempsey said. "With the next generation [EHT] facility, it will be very exciting to test our models of the environment around the black hole, and what we understand about the processes of how gas flows around it," Professor Miller-Jones said. "The more elements we bring in, the more sensitive we become, and the more certain we can be of fitting what we see … to the model," Dr Dempsey said. So how will we answer these questions? "Sgr A* seems to have a strong, dynamically significant magnetic field, which means it's a magnetic field strong enough to affect the motion of the plasma around the black hole," Professor Miller-Jones said. "As our instruments on the ground and in space improve our understanding, the Milky Way black hole is going to go a long way to unpacking general relativity, and how that works with quantum mechanics," said Dr Dempsey, former deputy director of the East-Asia Observatory in Hawaii. The hunt to understand what is going on at the centre of our galaxy is hundreds of years old."

Event Horizon telescope captures image giving a glimpse of the turbulent heart of our galaxy.

The EHT picks up radiation emitted by particles within the accretion disc that are heated to billions of degrees as they orbit the black hole before plunging into the central vortex. Some combination of these factors – and possibly some extreme black hole phenomenon – explain the bright blobs in the image. A minority of scientists had continued to speculate about the possibility of other exotic objects, such as boson stars or clumps of dark matter. Markoff compared the observations with trying to photograph a puppy chasing its tail using a camera with a slow shutter speed. The black hole itself, known as Sagittarius A*, cannot be seen because no light or matter can escape its gravitational grip. It’s been a 100-year search for these things and so, scientifically, it’s a huge deal.”

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.

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.

They are calling it a "gentle giant" on a near-starvation diet, rather than a voracious cosmic destroyer.

The Milky Way black hole is much closer, about 27,000 light-years away. This is not the first black hole image. Previous efforts to capture a good image found the black hole too jumpy. This one is about the size of the orbit of Mercury around our sun. It is 4 million times more massive than our sun. Astronomers believe nearly all galaxies, including our own, have these giant black holes at their centre, where light and matter cannot escape, making it extremely hard to get images of them.

Scientists have provided the first look at the mega black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy.

The diameter of Sagittarius A* is about 17 times that of the sun, meaning it would sit within the innermost planet Mercury's solar orbit. "They go through periods where there is a lot of material around them," Özel said. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy that contains at least 100 billion stars. The black hole - called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* - is the second one ever to be imaged. It is putting out only a few hundred times the energy of the sun despite being much more massive. This is called the black hole's shadow or silhouette.

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

"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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A team of scientists from around the world collaborated to get a visual peek of the supermassive object.

Researchers began a major observation campaign in March 2022, which included more telescopes added to the array, aimed at generating higher-resolution images of black hole event horizons, even movies. The images of two black holes, despite the differences in size, look nearly identical. “This is what we had hoped to find given the predictions of Einstein's theory of general relativity, said Feryal Özel, an EHT scientist from the University of Arizona, at the press conference. Both images of the two black holes look similar because they are the consequence of gravity. The team was faced with other challenges, like observing the black hole through Earth’s atmosphere and the turbulent gas of our galaxy. The image gives greater insight into the mysteries of black holes and further confirms Einstein’s long-standing theory of relativity.

The first ever image of the black hole at the center of our galaxy has been released by scientists, who say it shows Albert Einstein was right about ...

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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.