First time in History! Image shows magnetic field of a black hole
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Washington, Apr 3: For the first time, international scientists working on the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) have created an image showing the magnetic field around a black hole, located in M87 galaxy. In 2019, the astronomers working on the EHT captured the first image of the shadow of the same black hole.
The shadow of the black hole is a dark region that surrounds the black hole. It is three times the diameter of the black hole. The shadow of the black hole is the point beyond which even light cannot escape. Now the scientists have analyzed the polarization of light in the bright region around the shadow of the black hole.
According to the analysis, some matter is sucked into the black hole and the other matter is blasted out in jets. This blasted out matter is hot and violent. It creates large amounts of light as the matter here is accelerated. The conclusion of the analysis is that only presence of strong magnetic fields shall polarize this huge volume of light energy. The new image will help to understand how powerful jets of radiation are emitted by black holes.
The Event Horizon Telescope is a telescope array that consists of a global network of radio telescopes. The main observational targets of the telescope project are two black holes. These black holes are located in Messier 87 and Sagittarius A. Just like M 87, Sagittarius A is also a radio source and is located at the Galactic Center of the Milky Way. Galactic Centre is the rotational center of the Milky Way galaxy.
The Milky Way galaxy is at its brightest in three spots. They are Sagittarius, Scorpius and Ophiuchus. The Milky Way is brighter in Sagittarius probably due to the presence of a black hole. In 2020, Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzei received Nobel Prize in Physics. They discovered that black hole is the only explanation for the mass and brightness around Sagittarius A.