Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy | 2015 Dec 03
Event Horizon Telescope Reveals Magnetic Fields at the Central Black Hole of our Galaxy
[img3="Artist’s conception of the black hole at the center of our galaxy, surrounded by a hot disk of accreting material. Blue lines trace magnetic fields. The Event Horizon Telescope has measured those magnetic fields for the first time with a resolution of 6 times the size of the event horizon (6 Schwarzschild radii). The fields in the disk appear to be disorderly, with jumbled loops and whorls resembling intertwined spaghetti. The EHT also found regions showing much more organized patterns, possibly where jets (shown by the narrow yellow streamer) would be generated. (Credit: CfA/M.Weiss)"]http://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/3518368/zoom.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]An international research team including scientists from the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany, connected a global network of radio telescopes to observe the magnetic field structure in the direct neighbourhood of the central source of our Galaxy.
The observations were performed with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) bringing together a network of telescopes at millimeter wavelengths. They show not only details in the polarized radio emission at very high resolution, but also fluctuations of the magnetic field at short time scales. ...
Most people think of black holes as giant vacuum cleaners sucking in everything that gets too close. But the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies are more like cosmic engines, converting energy from infalling matter into intense radiation that can outshine the combined light from all surrounding stars. If the black hole is spinning, it can generate strong jets that blast across thousands of light-years and shape entire galaxies. These black hole engines are thought to be powered by magnetic fields. For the first time, astronomers have detected magnetic fields just outside the event horizon of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. ...
Event Horizon Telescope Reveals Magnetic Fields at Milky Way's Central Black Hole
Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics | 2015 Dec 03
Resolved Magnetic-Field Structure and Variability Near the Event Horizon of Sagittarius A* - Michael D. Johnson et al
- Science 350(6265):1242 (04 Dec 2015) DOI: 10.1126/science.aac7087
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1512.01220 > 03 Dec 2015