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<\/p>\nAstronomers from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration have found strong magnetic fields spiraling around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, named Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). In 2022, the EHT Collaboration released the first image of Sgr A*, revealing that it looked very similar to the much larger black hole at the center of Messier 87 galaxy (M87*). This prompted the team to study Sgr A* in polarized light, which helped them study magnetic fields surrounding the black hole.<\/p>\n
Sagittarius A* is located 27,000 light-years from Earth and has a mass about four million times that of the Sun. The Event Horizon Telescope observed the black hole in April 2017. The EHT Collaboration used these observations for both the original image from 2022 and the current study.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we\u2019re seeing now is that there are strong, twisted, and organized magnetic fields near the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy,\u201d said Sara Issaoun of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, Cambridge, Massachusetts. \u201cAlong with Sgr A* having a strikingly similar polarization structure to that seen in the much larger and more powerful M87* black hole, we\u2019ve learned that strong and ordered magnetic fields are critical to how black holes interact with the gas and matter around them.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Location of Sagittarius A* in the Milky Way, imaged in polarized light. (Credit: S. Issaoun, EHT Collaboration)<\/p>\n
Because of its distance, studying Sagittarius A* requires more than just an ordinary telescope. The Event Horizon Telescope is a global collaboration of radio telescopes linked together to operate in unison to study black holes. This collaboration effectively creates an Earth-sized virtual telescope, which allows astronomers to observe black holes and their surroundings directly.<\/p>\n
Even with the EHT, studying black holes is hard. The plasma surrounding Sgr A* orbits the black hole in only a few minutes, which means the astronomers could not get a clear picture unless they found a way to compensate for that rotation. To generate the first image from 2022, the astronomers had to create an average of thousands of other images that all accurately fit the EHT observations.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s more, the signal is disturbed by interstellar plasma between Earth and the black hole, making it even harder to study, especially in polarized light.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause Sgr A* moves around while we try to take its picture, it was difficult to construct even the unpolarized image,\u201d said Geoffrey Bower of the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. \u201cWe were relieved that polarized imaging was even possible. Some models were far too scrambled and turbulent to construct a polarized image, but nature was not so cruel.\u201d<\/p>\n
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