Black hole

WASHINGTON - The world's first image of the chaotic supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy doesn't portray a voracious cosmic ...

The Milky Way black hole is much closer, about 27,000 light-years away. "We love our black hole." This is not the first black hole image. Black holes gobble up galactic material, but Ozel said this one is "eating very little." 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.

The colorized image unveiled Thursday is from the international consortium behind the Event Horizon Telescope, a collection of eight synchronized radio ...

If you're not that impressed by the first-ever picture of the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, then it may be you haven't quite grasped the gravity ...

In fact, the EHT is effectively a planet-sized telescope, made up of observatories in the South Pole, North and South America, Hawaii and Europe. But what it does do is help scientists gain greater understanding of the laws of nature. Before the image was taken, we did not even know for sure there was a black hole at the heart of the Milky Way.

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.

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.

Astronomers have developed a technique that could measure the 'shadows' of black hole binary systems in distant galaxies. Share ...

There’s never been a more important time to explain the facts, cherish evidence-based knowledge and to showcase the latest scientific, technological and engineering breakthroughs. Please support us by making a donation or purchasing a subscription today. So, if scientists measure how long it lasts, they can estimate the size and shape of this shadow. This could give researchers an easier way to measure black holes which are smaller than M87 and reside in more distant galaxies. The image was made possible thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope – a global network of synchronised radio dishes which act as one giant telescope. At first, the team thought this was the result of a coding mistake, but eventually realised that each dip in brightness closely matched the time taken for the black hole closest to the viewer to pass in front of the shadow of the black hole at the back.

Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, has fascinated cosmologists for years. Now we've got pics.

Our black hole is in a quiet phase right now, said Avi Loeb, a professor of astrophysics at Harvard. That’s because it’s consumed most of the material within its range. Our black hole is relatively quiet, which is why it was so hard to get a photograph of anything up close to it. Efforts to understand black holes could lead scientists to a more encompassing understanding of the rest of our universe, and of its still-mysterious origin. That is, it’s not known whether Sagittarius A* got so big by consuming 4 million stars, or whether it was born from a lump in the primordial matter of the universe, after which stars began to light up around it. One reason scientists are so fascinated with black holes is that they grab hold of the fabric of time and space, slowing time to a crawl as matter swirls toward a point of no return. That appears to be typical of the hearts all but the tiniest galaxies.

The international scientific collaboration known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has published the first ever images of the black hole, ...

“For decades, astronomers have wondered what lies at the heart of our galaxy, pulling stars into tight orbits through its immense gravity,” pointed out Centre for Astrophysics/Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) astrophysicist and EHT researcher Michael Johnson. “With the EHT image, we have zoomed in a thousand times closer than these orbits, where the gravity grows a million times stronger. For a long time now, astronomers have believed that a black hole lay at the centre of our galaxy. The data for the image of Sgr A* was collected using eight instrumental telescopes which simultaneously collected data on the black hole, over a continuous period of many hours, over multiple nights, during 2017.

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.

The breakthrough is a result of the work of 300 scientists from 80 institutions, including Wits University.

“Southern Africa holds a distinct geographic advantage to host new EHT telescopes, especially if we wish to make movies of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, which passes directly above us in the Southern sky.” Their contributions included precision measurements of the black hole ring size using a suite of algorithms, as well as developing the sophisticated software suite used to simulate realistic EHT datasets. “The analogy I’ve got is of a three-year-old child and a one-year-old child in a photograph together. And there’s a lot of gas and dust … that scatter and blur the ring-like feature and that has to be accounted for in the imaging process and in the calibration process. 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.” “The new view captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole, which is four million times more massive than our sun.”

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.

Known as Sagittarius A*, the object is a staggering four million times the mass of our Sun.

Known as Sagittarius A*, the object is a staggering four million times the mass of our Sun. Known as Sagittarius A*, the object is a staggering four million times the mass of our Sun.

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.

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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Black holes can often be misunderstood. Here are some major misconceptions about these fascinating cosmic objects.

Many aspects of black holes remain mysterious, particularly their insides. The majority of black holes, however, aren't actively eating anything. "That's the last point," Marco Ajello, an astrophysicist at Clemson University who researches supermassive black holes and galaxies, told Mashable. Hypothetically, he explained, a person could still use a flashlight just outside the event horizon. If you somehow visited the surface of the sun, you still wouldn't be immediately next to an object with nearly the density of a black hole. Black holes aren't relentless cosmic vacuum cleaners with unnatural gravitational powers. If it were, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way would continuously inhale new stars which, fortunately for us, it doesn't. "They are not vacuum cleaners, otherwise we'd be in one," agreed Gobeille. (A hot accretion disk allowed astronomers to image the first-ever black hole; the disk revealed the black hole.) Eventually, some of this accumulated stuff does spiral into the black hole, but much of it gets spit back out into space: The fast, rotating disk's natural motion ejects material. In fact, if the sun were replaced with a black hole of the same mass, most planets would continue their motion around the Sun just as they are now, with only the closest planets noticing some tidal forces from the black hole. But matter or light passing close by can get pulled around a black hole. And if Earth were replaced with a black hole of the same mass, the moon's orbit wouldn't change much either. Something would have to move faster than the speed of light — traveling from Earth to the moon in roughly a second — to breakout. But really, black holes aren’t evil, mean, or scary.

Dr Iniyan Natarajan and Professor Roger Deane were the only two researchers from Africa in an international team of over 300 people.

The image captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole, which is four million times more massive than our Sun. These were critical to robustly compare the observations with predictions from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Two scientists from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) were among the research team that unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy.

Researchers in effect created a telescope with an Earth-sized aperture | The Economist explains.

So whereas the gases of M87* remained relatively static while being observed, around Sgr A* they were constantly moving. How did they take a picture of a black hole? Things were harder with Sgr A*. Because it is smaller, its surrounding gases take much less time to orbit than those around M87* do—a matter of minutes, rather than weeks. The hard drives were then shipped to two supercomputers at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology in America and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany. (Uploading the data via the internet would have taken a very long time.) The supercomputers then set about analysing the information, and assembling the many images from around the world into one comprehensive image. M87*, 55m light years from Earth in the Messier 87 galaxy, has a mass 6.6bn times greater than the Sun’s—but from Earth, it appears the same size as a coin on the surface of the Moon. Sgr A* is nearer—just 27,000 light years away—but much smaller. From Earth it looks like a doughnut on the Moon.

Published on 12 May 2022, the images show a blurry look at the black hole, known as Sagittarius A* (pronounced “Sagitarrius-Ay-Star”), which is about 27,000 ...

To capture images of the black hole, Bower’s team had to create the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a powerful machine that linked together eight existing radio observatories across the planet to form a single “Earth-sized” virtual telescope. The glowing gas around the massive space phenomenon reveals the “telltale signature” of a black hole, that is, a dark central region called a “shadow” surrounded by a bright ring-like structure. The long-anticipated visuals of the super-massive object provide clear evidence to the scientific community for the first time ever that our galaxy does indeed have a black hole at its centre.

Now scientists have the first-ever photograph of the formidable force at the center of our galaxy: Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole with the mass of 4 ...

Scientists have for the first time imaged the black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy. But, how did they capture this mysterious object 27000 ...

This is due to the gas in the vicinity of the black hole that moves nearly as fast as light. “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. To see something as big and as far as a black hole at the centre of our own galaxy, we needed an Earth-sized telescope. The new view captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole, which is four million times more massive than our Sun. Sgr A* is located at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy and is 27,000 light-years away from us. It was in 2019 that the Event Horizon Telescope showed the world what a dark void over 100 times the mass of the Sun looks like.

To produce the image “involved an international team of more than 300 scientists,” Xavier Barcons, director-general of the European Southern Observatory, said ...

Scientists estimate there could be as many as a billion black holes in the Milky Way, according to NASA. The collaboration of scientists reveals what is called the “event horizon,” the boundary at the edge of a black hole where the gravitational pull is so strong that no conventional physical laws apply and nothing can escape. Black holes form from remnants of a large star that dies in a supernova explosion.

The world's first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy doesn't portray a voracious cosmic destroyer but what ...

Bizarre and mysterious as a black hole might be, it poses no threat to our world and is essentially just a part of the galactic furniture. "We live out in the suburbs [in a spiral arm of the galaxy]. Things are calm out here." What's at the very core of a black hole is a question that Vincent Fish, a research scientist at the MIT Haystack Observatory, did not attempt to answer when questioned. 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. "We find a bright ring surrounding the black hole shadow," she said. 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. Black holes gobble up galactic material but Ozel said this one is "eating very little." The colorized image unveiled Thursday is from an international consortium behind the Event Horizon Telescope, a collection of eight synchronized radio telescopes around the world. It is about the size of the orbit of Mercury around our sun. 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.

Black holes are among the most profound predictions of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Originally studied as a mere mathematical consequence of the ...

This had its challenges, as I had to deal with every typo and every mistake in the typesetting. We had a lot of meetings to come to a consensus of what it tells us. The reason for the similarity is that while the M87* black hole is about 1,000 times bigger, the Sagittarius black hole is about 100 times closer. The publication of the picture of the Sagittarius A* black hole is a tremendously exciting achievement by the collaboration. The surprising thing about this image is that it looks so similar to the image of M87* we published three years ago – this certainly came as a surprise. This means there is now overwhelming evidence for the black hole, dubbed Sagittarius A*. While it might seem a little scary to be so close to such a beast, it is in fact some 26,000 light-years away, which is reassuringly far.