The Milky Way’s black hole has lit up in a way we’ve never seen before

Astronomers have detected a mid-infrared glow from the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way for the first time, shedding new light on the complex physics that drives these energetic outbursts.

The flare — a burst of energy that changes intensity as the black hole’s magnetic field lines interact — fills an area of ​​black hole observations that previously eluded scientists. However, questions remain about the chaotic environment near the core of the deep object.

The team’s discovery and modeling of the flare is accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters And he Currently available On the arXiv preprint server. The results were presented today at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Maryland.

The black hole, called Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star), is an object about four million times the mass of our Sun located at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy. Black holes are extremely dense objects with gravitational fields so intense that even light cannot escape their boundaries beyond a point called the event horizon. In the artist’s concept at the beginning of this article, a black hole is the dark chasm at the heart of a vortex of matter.

“For more than 20 years, we have known what happens in the radio and near-infrared (NIR) bands, but the relationship between them has never been 100% clear,” said Joseph Michael, one of the paper’s lead authors and a researcher at Harvard University. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian, in the center He releases. “This new observation in the mid-infrared fills this gap.”

Mid-infrared light has longer wavelengths than visible light but shorter wavelengths than radio waves. It also happens to be a specialty of the Webb Space Telescope, which the telescope captures using the mid-infrared instrument (MIRI).

Cooled electrons in the black hole’s accretion disk — the superheated glowing material surrounding the object — release energy to power the flares. The role of electrons in black hole flares has been revealed at mid-infrared wavelengths, and according to Michael, this provides another clue as to what fuels the flares.

The discovery and the team’s model provide greater clarity and complexity to the picture of the central black hole in our galaxy. Modeling black hole physics and directly imaging objects go hand in hand in bringing us closer to understanding the physics that underpins some of the most massive and magnificent objects in our universe.

The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration has directly imaged a black hole First time In April 2019; Collaboration continued this feat with First live photo From Sagittarius A* in May 2022, although a group of researchers suggested last year that this image was Defective.

Last year, the collaboration – whose telescope includes a network of radio telescope observatories around the world – resulted in the highest resolution observations ever obtained of the planet. The work indicated that at certain wavelengths, images of future black holes could be 50% sharper than previously published images.

It may take more observations to verify whether high-energy cooled electrons are indeed responsible for the flares. But this discovery provides a new twist in the story of black holes, and demonstrates the role the Webb Space Telescope can play in demystifying massive objects.