James Miller-Jones, an astrophysicist at Curtin University and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, expects to see images of a supermassive black hole with a more dynamic environment than what the EHT captured in 2019. The jet launching from Centaurus A’s supermassive black hole features a hollow centre and bright edges. (Supplied: R. Jets are a phenomenon seen in other galaxies, including M87 and Centaurus A’s central black hole, as captured by the EHT and reported last year. Professor Bland-Hawthorn and colleagues have published evidence of a weak jet coming from the centre of the Milky Way. “I’m going to predict some kind of a jet phenomenon or some kind of focused collimated something, like a jet or a bubble blasting off right from the black hole region.” Given the hype, images of Sgr A* will likely be more than the gold-and-orange donut of M87’s emission ring, Professor Bland-Hawthorn said. Like the image of M87’s black hole, the simulation of Sgr A* is fuzzy due to the distortion of gas and dust around the black hole and its crushing gravity. The EHT team previously modelled what it suspected the black hole might look like in short radio wavelengths of 1.3 millimetres. “So we don’t have a lot of radiation that helps us generate some kind of a shadow,” Professor Bland Hawthorn said.Īnd because SgrA* is changing much faster than the lumbering M87*, it has been much more challenging to get images that aren’t blurred. Sgr A* is also nowhere near as active as M87, which is feeding on gas and stars and blasting out radiation. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is about half the size of M87 and contains about a 10th of the stars, so it follows that our supermassive black hole would be smaller too. Generally, the bigger the galaxy, the heftier its central black hole. “Our black hole is nothing like the black hole in M87,” Professor Bland-Hawthorn said.įor one, M87’s black hole is more massive - way more. How does Sgr A* compare to the black hole in M87?Īt 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun, the black hole in the centre of M87 is one of the largest supermassive black holes in our neck of the universe. “The evidence is overwhelming that powered by a past explosion from the black hole,” he said. Massive bubbles of X-rays and gamma rays tower over the centre of the Milky Way.(Supplied: NASA Goddard) In 2010, we got the best look at the centre of our galaxy when the Chandra X-ray Observatory took a snapshot that showed the remains of a massive explosion near Sgr A* and large bubbles of hot gas extending for a dozen light-years on either side of the black hole, as well as mysterious X-ray filaments. To snap a portrait of a black hole, the EHT detects light beamed out by hot gas swirling around the edge of the black hole’s disc.īut until now, our view of the black hole at the centre of our galaxy has been limited to the effects of its immense gravitational tug on material whizzing around it. At their centre, gravity is so strong that not even light can escape. “They got that region down to such a tiny region, it could only be a black hole or something that behaves like a black hole.”Īndrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel, who led the teams, shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work. Their measurements indicated the blob was about 4 million times the mass of our Sun. “They tracked these stars over the course of 20 or so years, and realised that the stars were moving under the influence of a very, very massive, dense, dark blob,” Professor Bland-Hawthorn said. While astronomers suspected for decades our galaxy might harbour one, it was not pinned down until two separate teams in the US and Germany started studying the precise movements of stars around our galactic centre in the 1990s. Most galaxies have a supermassive black hole more than a million times the mass of our Sun at their heart. YOUTUBE: Buckle your seatbelt: We’re zooming into Sagittarius A*.
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