Paris. Astronomers discovered powerful magnetic fields that spiral around the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, located at the heart of the Milky Way, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced this Wednesday.
Produced through collaboration with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), the polarized light image reveals a structure strikingly similar to that observed in the supermassive black hole located at the center of the Galaxy M87, the first of which an image could be obtained.
“What we see now is that there are strong magnetic fields, twisted into a spiral and organized near the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy,” said Sara Issaoun, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (US). and co-leader of the project.
Sagittarius A* “has a polarization structure strikingly similar to that observed in the M87* black hole” and “we have learned that strong, ordered magnetic fields are fundamental to the way black holes interact with the gas and matter they contain.” surrounds them,” he explained.
Observation in polarized light makes it possible to isolate a part of the luminous radiation and thus reveal some of its particularities.
Supermassive black holes are found in the centers of galaxies, with a mass between one million and billions of times that of the Sun.
They are supposed to have appeared very early in the universe, but their formation remains a mystery.
The mass of black holes is so great that their gravitational attraction prevents even light from coming out – hence their name – which is why they cannot be observed directly.
But with M87* in 2019 and Sagittarius A* in 2022, the EHT captured the image of the halo of light that is produced by the flows of matter and gas that the black hole attracts and partially rejects.
“By imaging polarized light from the hot, bright gas near black holes, we are directly deducing the structure and strength of the magnetic fields that thread the flow of gas and matter on which they feed, and in turn time, they expel,” says Angelo Ricarte, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Black Hole Initiative and co-leader of the project.
For her part, Mariafelicia De Laurentis, deputy head of the scientific department of the EHT project, explains that with a sample of two black holes “it is important to determine how they are similar and how they are different.”
“In both cases the data indicate that they have strong magnetic fields, which suggests that this may be a universal and perhaps fundamental characteristic of this type of systems,” he highlights.
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– 2024-04-06 07:42:53
