Elijah Williams
Astronomers have discovered powerful “twisted” magnetic fields spiraling around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, according to the European Southern Observatory said Wednesday.
A new image from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has shown for the first time in polarized light a ring of magnetic fields around Sagittarius A* Black Hole.
The fields are similar to those observed around the M87* black hole in the heart of Galaxy M87which ESO says suggests that strong magnetic fields may be common to all black holes.
European Southern Observatory via Reuters
“What we’re seeing now is that there are strong, distorted, organized magnetic fields near the black hole at the center of the Milky Way,” said Sara Issaoun of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics and co-leader of the project. .
Polarized light imaging allows astronomers to isolate magnetic field lines.
Supermassive black holes, which are at the center of galaxies, have masses millions and even billions greater than that of the Sun. They are believed to have appeared very early in the universe, but their creation remains a mystery.
Nothing can escape their gravitational pull, not even light, making them impossible to observe directly.
But with the M87* in 2019 and Sagittarius A* in 2022the EHT captured the halo of light produced by the flow of matter and gas that black holes suck in and eject.
“By imaging polarized light from hot, glowing gas near black holes, we are directly inferring the structure and strength of the magnetic fields that cut through the flow of gas and matter that the black hole feeds on,” said Angelo Ricarte, member of the Harvard Black Hole Initiative and co-leader of the project.
ESO also released a video with the new discoveries, which were published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Mariafelicia De Laurentis, EHT deputy scientist and professor at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy, said that “since both (black holes) point us to strong magnetic fields, this suggests that this may be a universal feature and perhaps fundamental to these types of systems.”
News about the magnetic fields comes just weeks after researchers studied a galaxy using NASA’s satellite. James Webb Space Telescope announced several discoveries, including the location of the most distant active supermassive black hole already found.
In November, scientists discovered the oldest black hole however, it is estimated to have formed 470 million years after the Big Bang – and 10 times larger than the black hole in our Milky Way.
