Astronomers have discovered powerful magnetic fields spiraling around the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, located at the heart of our galaxy, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced on Wednesday, March 27.
A polarized light image shows a ring of orange light streaked with regular lines surrounding Sagittarius A*. Produced by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, in which ESO participates, it reveals a structure strikingly similar to that observed with M87*, the first black hole ever imaged, at the heart of the M87 galaxy.
“Strong magnetic fields”
The observations reveal “the existence of strong, twisted and organized magnetic fields near the black hole located at the center of the Milky Way,” said Sara Issaoun, from the American Center for Astrophysics at Harvard and co-director of the project, quoted by ESO.
Observation using polarized light allows, as a kind of filter, to isolate part of the light radiation of an object and thus reveal some of its particularities.
Supermassive black holes reside in the centers of galaxies, with a mass between a 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. Its gravitational pull is such that nothing can escape, neither matter nor light. Therefore, we cannot observe them directly.
But with M87* in 2019, then Sagittarius A* in 2022, the EHT imaged the halo of light produced by the flows of matter and gas that the black hole feeds and rejects.
“Polarized light tells us a lot more about astrophysics, the properties of gas, and the mechanisms that occur when a black hole feeds,” said Angelo Ricarte, a member of the Harvard Black Hole Initiative and co-director of the project.
Equally important is that “the fact that the two black holes direct us towards powerful magnetic fields suggests that this is a universal, even fundamental, characteristic of this type of system,” said Mariafelicia De Laurentis, associate scientist of the EHT project and teacher. at the Italian University of Naples Federico II.
Source: BFM TV
