NASA Telescope Supports Event Horizon Telescope in Studying Milky Way’s Black Holes – Did it Float?
The main panel of this graphic contains X-ray data from Chandra (in blue) depicting hot gas being blown away from massive stars near the black hole. Two pictures of Infrared lights at different wavelengths from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope showing stars (orange) and cold gas (purple). These images are seven light-years across at a distance of Sgr A*. A pull out shows the new EHT image, only about 1.8 x 10-5 light years (0.000018 light years, or about 10 light minutes). (Image provider: X-ray: NASA/CXC/STAR; IR: NASA/HST/STScI. Inset: Radio (EHT Collaboration))
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As the Event Horizon Telescope collects data for New image of the Milky Way’s supermassive black holeA legion of other telescopes including three of NASA’s X-ray observatories in space are also watching.
Astronomers are using these observations to learn more about how the black hole at the center of the Milky Way – known as Centaur A* (Sgr A* for short) – interacts with and corrodes the environment. Its field is about 27,000 light-years from Earth.
When the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) observed Sgr A* in April 2017 to create a new image, the scientists in the collaboration also looked at the same black hole with the detection instruments. different wavelengths of light. For this multi-wavelength observation campaign, they collected X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory; radio data from the East Asia Very Long Baseline Interferometer (VLBI) network and the global 3-millimeter VLBI array; and infrared data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.
“The Event Horizon Telescope has captured another remarkable image, this time of the massive black hole at the center of our home galaxy,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “A more holistic look at this black hole will help us learn more about its cosmic effects on its environment, and illustrate the international collaboration that will take us into the future and reveal discoveries we could never have imagined.”
An important goal is to capture X-ray light rays, which are thought to be driven by magnetic field processes similar to those seen on the Sun, but can be tens of millions of times stronger. These blobs occur approximately daily in the region of sky observed by the EHT, an area slightly larger than the event horizon of Sgr A*, the point of no return of falling matter. . Another goal is to get a critical look at what’s happening on a larger scale. While the EHT results show striking similarities between Sgr A* and the previous black hole it captured, M87*, the broader picture is much more complex.
Daryl Haggard of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, said: “If the new EHT image shows us the eye of a black hole storm, these multi-wavelength observations suggest wind and rain equivalent to hundreds of or even thousands of miles away,” said Daryl Haggard of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, one of the leading scientists of the multi-wavelength campaign. “How does this cosmic storm interact with and even disrupt its galactic environment?”
One of the biggest ongoing questions surrounding black holes is exactly how they collect, ingest, or even expel matter orbiting them at near-light speeds, in a process known as ” accretion”. This process is fundamental to the formation and growth of planets, stars, and black holes of all sizes, throughout the universe.
Chandra images of the hot gas around Sgr A* are important for accretion studies because they tell us how much matter is captured from nearby stars by the black hole’s gravity, as well as how much how likely it is to move closer to the event horizon. This important information is not available with current telescopes for any other black hole in the universe, including M87*.
Sera Markoff of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, another coordinator of multi-wavelength observations, said: “Astronomers can largely agree on the basics – that black holes have matter. matter revolves around them, and some of it falls across the event horizon forever. “With all the data we gathered for Sgr A*, we could go a lot further than this basic picture.”
Scientists in a large international collaboration compared data from the high-energy missions of NASA and other telescopes with modern computational models that take into account factors such as general relativity. Einstein’s theory, the effect of the magnetic field and the prediction of how much radiation the material around the black hole must produce at different wavelengths.
Comparing the models with measurements shows that the magnetic field around the black hole is very strong and the angle between the black hole’s line of sight and its axis of rotation is low – less than about 30 degrees. If confirmed, this means that from our vantage point we are looking down on Sgr A* and its ring more than we do from the opposite side, surprisingly similar to EHT’s first target is the M87*.
“None of our models matched the data perfectly, but now we have more specific information to work with,” said Kazuhiro Hada from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. “The more data we have, the more accurate our models, and ultimately, our understanding of black hole accretion, will become.”
The researchers also managed to capture X-ray flares – or flares – from Sgr A* during the EHT observations: a faint one was seen with Chandra and Swift, and a moderately bright one was seen. seen with Chandra and NuSTAR. Chandra regularly observed X-ray blobs of similar brightness to the following, but this is the first time that the EHT has observed Sgr A* simultaneously, providing a unique opportunity to identify the mechanism responsible by Use real pictures.
The millimeter wave intensity and variability observed with EHT increased in the hours immediately after the X-ray became brighter, a phenomenon not seen in millimeter observations a few days earlier. The analysis and interpretation of the EHT data immediately following the fire will be reported in future publications.
The results of the EHT team will be announced on May 12 in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The multi-wavelength results are mainly described in the papers II and DRAW.
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-Ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.
Goddard manages the Swift mission in partnership with Penn State, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and Northrop Grumman Space Systems in Dulles, Virginia. Other partners include the University of Leicester and the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in the United Kingdom, the Brera Observatory in Italy, and the Italian Space Agency.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California administers NuSTAR for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Mission partners and contributors include Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Italian Space Agency (ASI), Columbia University, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Orbital Sciences Corp. , University of California, Berkeley and the NASA High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Research Center.
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Last Updated: May 12, 2022
Editor: Lee Mohon
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