The results are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “These unprecedented observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very centre of our galaxy,” said EHT project scientist Geoffrey Bower, of Taiwan’s Academia Sinica.īower also said in a statement provided by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) that the observations had offered “new insights on how these giant black holes interact with their surroundings”. The image depicts not the black hole itself, because that is completely dark, but the glowing gas that encircles the phenomenon, which is four million times more massive than the Sun, in a bright ring of bending light. The image, produced by a global team of scientists known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, is the first, direct visual confirmation of the presence of this invisible object, and comes three years after the very first image of a black hole from a distant galaxy. ![]() Light gets chaotically bent and twisted around by gravity as it gets sucked into the abyss along with superheated gas and dust. ![]() Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter llmysteries, then join us on Facebook.An international team of astronomers on Thursday unveiled the first image of a supermassive black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy, a cosmic body known as Sagittarius A*.Īstronomers believe nearly all galaxies, including our own, have these giant black holes at their centre, where light and matter cannot escape, making it extremely hard to get images of them. Less exciting than a refueling UFO or a brand new planet, maybe - but there's nothing quite like the truth.įollow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter nattyover. In this image, which captured light in the visible wavelength range, a bright swirl of material from the prominence trails the fainter edge of the coronal mass ejection as the two plunge into space. "It's generally accepted, though still not conclusively proven, that prominence eruptions occur when the overlying magnetic field that contains the prominence material is disrupted," he said.Īnother image showing the same coronal mass ejection and prominence eruption was captured by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory on Monday. According to Gurman, the first event was probably an outburst of the sun's magnetic field called a coronal mass ejection. In the image sequence, there is a burst of activity around the prominence, and then it and the filament channel shoot out into space immediately afterwards. "The absorption is typically seen in lines such as Fe XIV only in the thinnest, densest parts of the prominence, which is here seen edge-on as it rotates over the solar limb," he said. The dark filament seen in the images (the refueling UFO's "tether," according to YouTube users) is a part of the prominence that happens to absorb light of this color, making it appear dark. He added that the development of these structures is quite common.īut why is the prominence dark? Gurman explained that all the light in the SDO images is the same color - a specific wavelength that is emitted by iron atoms that have been ionized 13 times, known as Fe XIV. And this tunnel sits up top of the filament," Young explained at The Sun Today. "When you look at it from the edge of the sun, what you actually see is a spherical object. ![]() Alex Young, a solar astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who runs a website called The Sun Today, explained that the prominence is situated below a tunnel-shape feature called a filament channel.
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