The Milky Way’s Black Hole Comes to Light
The Event Horizon Telescope has once again caught sight of the “unseeable.”
The Milky Way’s Black Hole Comes to Light
The Event Horizon Telescope has once again caught sight of the “unseeable.”
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 “the gentle giant” dwelling there: a supermassive black hole, a trapdoor in space-time through which the equivalent of four million suns have been dispatched to eternity, leaving behind only their gravity and violently bent space-time.
The image, released in six simultaneous news conferences in Washington and around the globe, showed a lumpy doughnut of radio emission framing empty space. Oohs and aahs broke out at the National Press Club in Washington when Feryal Özel of the University of Arizona displayed what she called “the first direct image of the gentle giant in the center of our galaxy.” She added: “It seems that black holes like doughnuts.”
Astronomers said the new result would lead to a better understanding of gravity, galaxy evolution and how even placid-seeming clouds of stars like our own majestic pinwheel of stars, the Milky Way, can generate quasars, enormous geysers of energy that can be seen across the universe.
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 “the gentle giant” dwelling there: a supermassive black hole, a trapdoor in space-time through which the equivalent of four million suns have been dispatched to eternity, leaving behind only their gravity and violently bent space-time.
The image, released in six simultaneous news conferences in Washington and around the globe, showed a lumpy doughnut of radio emission framing empty space. Oohs and aahs broke out at the National Press Club in Washington when Feryal Özel of the University of Arizona displayed what she called “the first direct image of the gentle giant in the center of our galaxy.” She added: “It seems that black holes like doughnuts.”
Astronomers said the new result would lead to a better understanding of gravity, galaxy evolution and how even placid-seeming clouds of stars like our own majestic pinwheel of stars, the Milky Way, can generate quasars, enormous geysers of energy that can be seen across the universe.
Einstein’s bad dream
Black holes were an unwelcome consequence of the general theory of relativity, which attributed gravity to the warping of space and time by matter and energy, much in the way that a mattress sags under a sleeper.
Einstein’s insight led to a new conception of the cosmos, in which space-time could quiver, bend, rip, expand, swirl and even disappear forever into the maw of a black hole, an entity with gravity so strong that not even light could escape it.
Einstein disapproved of this idea, but the universe is now known to be speckled with black holes. Many are the remains of dead stars that collapsed inward on themselves and just kept going.
But there appears to be a black hole at the center of nearly every galaxy, ours included, that can be millions or billions of times as massive as our sun. Astronomers still do not understand how these supermassive black holes have grown so big.
Paradoxically, despite their ability to swallow light, black holes are the most luminous objects in the universe. Materials — gas, dust, shredded stars — that fall into a black hole are heated to millions of degrees in a dense maelstrom of electromagnetic fields. Some of that matter falls into the black hole, but part of it is squirted out by enormous pressures and magnetic fields.
Such fireworks — quasars — can outshine galaxies by a thousandfold. Their discovery in the early 1960s led physicists and astronomers to take seriously the notion that black holes existed.
What gave rise to such behemoths of nothingness is a mystery. Dense wrinkles in the primordial energies of the Big Bang? Monster runaway stars that collapsed and consumed their surroundings in the dawning years of the universe?
Since 1974, the center of the Milky Way has been known to coincide with a faint source of radio noise called Sagittarius A* (pronounced Sagittarius A-star).
Astronomers including Andrea Ghez of the University of California, Los Angeles and Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics had calculated that whatever was there had the mass of 4.14 million suns and was confined within a sphere the size of Mercury’s orbit around the sun. They reached that estimate by tracking the orbits of stars and gas clouds swirling about the center of the Milky Way and measuring their velocities at one-third the speed of light. For their achievement, Dr. Genzel and Dr. Ghez won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020.
Einstein’s insight led to a new conception of the cosmos, in which space-time could quiver, bend, rip, expand, swirl and even disappear forever into the maw of a black hole, an entity with gravity so strong that not even light could escape it.
Einstein disapproved of this idea, but the universe is now known to be speckled with black holes. Many are the remains of dead stars that collapsed inward on themselves and just kept going.
But there appears to be a black hole at the center of nearly every galaxy, ours included, that can be millions or billions of times as massive as our sun. Astronomers still do not understand how these supermassive black holes have grown so big.
Paradoxically, despite their ability to swallow light, black holes are the most luminous objects in the universe. Materials — gas, dust, shredded stars — that fall into a black hole are heated to millions of degrees in a dense maelstrom of electromagnetic fields. Some of that matter falls into the black hole, but part of it is squirted out by enormous pressures and magnetic fields.
Such fireworks — quasars — can outshine galaxies by a thousandfold. Their discovery in the early 1960s led physicists and astronomers to take seriously the notion that black holes existed.
What gave rise to such behemoths of nothingness is a mystery. Dense wrinkles in the primordial energies of the Big Bang? Monster runaway stars that collapsed and consumed their surroundings in the dawning years of the universe?
Since 1974, the center of the Milky Way has been known to coincide with a faint source of radio noise called Sagittarius A* (pronounced Sagittarius A-star).
Astronomers including Andrea Ghez of the University of California, Los Angeles and Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics had calculated that whatever was there had the mass of 4.14 million suns and was confined within a sphere the size of Mercury’s orbit around the sun. They reached that estimate by tracking the orbits of stars and gas clouds swirling about the center of the Milky Way and measuring their velocities at one-third the speed of light. For their achievement, Dr. Genzel and Dr. Ghez won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020.
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Can't they make it clearer. Looks jacked like hell.