![]() ![]() (Image credit: EHT Collaboration) (opens in new tab) The Event Horizon Telescope has captured the first image of Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Black holes are points in space where this warping effect becomes so strong that Einstein's equations break down, causing not just all nearby matter but all nearby light to be sucked inside. Gravity, Einstein discovered, isn't produced by an unseen force, but is simply our experience of space-time curving and distorting in the presence of matter and energy. "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."Įinstein's theory of general relativity describes how massive objects can warp the fabric of the universe, called space-time. "We were stunned by how well the ring size agreed with predictions from Einstein's theory of general relativity," Geoffrey Bower, an EHT collaborator and astronomer at Academia Sinica, Taipei, said in a statement. This new observation, which shows light being bent around the space-time-warping behemoth, puts their suspicions beyond all doubt. The author is a freelance writer in Tucson, Arizona.Scientists have long thought that an enormous supermassive black hole must lurk at the center of our galaxy, its gravity tethering the Milky Way's dust, gas, stars and planets in a loose orbit about it and causing stars closeby to circle around it rapidly. One predominant effect is so-called relativistic beaming, or Doppler boosting, which causes light moving toward Earth to appear brighter and makes the donut brighter on one side. But its emitted light is distorted from gravitational lensing effects. The gas is actually evenly distributed around the black hole. Ultimately, this image is a composite of the three efforts. They compared the three different images and found that they agreed to a high statistical threshold. ![]() The two other teams used two different astrophysical models to fill in the missing pixels. One team filled in the missing parts with mathematical algorithms, for example, that assume the image comes from point sources. The researchers reconstructed the image in three parallel efforts, says Broderick. Image Processing: The raw telescope data is missing parts of the image and requires image reconstruction to fill in the gaps. “It’s the telltale signature of the event horizon,” says Doeleman. Researchers refer to the boundary between the ring of light and the interior darkness the black hole’s shadow. The bright ring of light is the so-called photon orbit, where gravity is so strong that it bends light in closed paths around the black hole. Notable features: The light comes from gas, predominantly hydrogen, which orbits the black hole and emits radio waves. The researchers infer its orientation from the position of a jet that appears in X-ray images of the area and from models they have built and tested. That is, the black hole rotates in the clockwise direction. Orientation: The image shows the black hole almost directly face-on: its angular momentum vector points into the page at an angle of 17 degrees, counterclockwise. ![]()
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