Scientists reveal astonishing image of black hole in our galaxy

Scientists have revealed an astonishing new image of the black hole at the middle of our galaxy.

The object – known as Sagittarius A* – is shown in polarised light for the first time, in a profound breakthrough.

It offers a new view of that supermassive black hole that lies at the heart of our own Milky Way. The swirling image shows the magnetic field structure around the black hole, and suggests that it might have a hidden jet.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, who produced the first ever image of our Milky Way black hole released in 2022, has captured a new view of the massive object at the centre of our Galaxy: how it looks in polarised light (EHT Collaboration)

The image was created by the scientists as part of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration. That produced the first image of a black hole – when in 2019 it produced a picture of the one at the heart of the M87 galaxy – and followed it in 2022 with an image of the one at the heart of our Milky Way.

Our galaxy’s Milky Way is a thousand times smaller and less massive than M87’s. But the new picture suggests they might be remarkably similar: as well as sharing a common look, they appear to have similar magnetic field structures – suggesting those processes might be similar across black holes.

(EHT Collaboration)

“What we’re seeing now is that there are strong, twisted, and organized magnetic fields near the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy,” said Sara Issaoun, NASA Hubble Fellowship Program Einstein Fellow at the Center for Astrophysics at the Harvard & Smithsonian and co-lead of the project.

“Along with Sgr A* having a strikingly similar polarization structure to that seen in the much larger and more powerful M87* black hole, we’ve learned that strong and ordered magnetic fields are critical to how black holes interact with the gas and matter around them.”

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