Science Saturday: Black Hole Edition

June 22, 2019

Happy weekend, and welcome back to Science Saturday! It’s been far too long since I’ve posted about the activities of the science community. Researchers all over the world have been making strides in many different disciplines, but particularly in relation to the study of black holes. Because of this, and in honor of the common suggestion that I hadn’t been posting because I was sucked into a black hole, I’m pleased to present Science Saturday: Black Hole Edition.

The first ever photo of a black hole.
Image: EHT Collaboration

ScienceNews: Say Cheese!

In April, A research team in charge of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global network of telescopes that can work together to image subjects in distant space, released the first optical image of a black hole. The image is of the supermassive black hole at the heart of galaxy M87 (pictured above), and it differs quite a bit from the artist’s renderings of swirly pits of death that we’ve gotten used to seeing.

Forbes: Black Holes Don’t Suck

It turns out that black holes don’t really suck in everything that comes near them, as is the common belief. In reality, only a small portion of the mass that enters the gravitational influence of a black hole crosses the event horizon in a timely manner. The majority of the mass, which is mostly gasses, remains trapped in the turbulent gravitational forces around the black hole. These forces superheat a portion of the gas, creating a glowing accretion disk. Some of the mass even ends up being ejected away from the black hole.

Space.com: Cool Gas

While much of the gasses orbiting a black hole make up the glowing accretion disk, researchers studying the black hole at the center of our own galaxy (known as Sagittarius A*) have recently discovered that there is also a disk of (relatively) cool gas surrounding the celestial giant. Scientists used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile to analyze the center of the Milky Way. Specifically, they focused on wavelengths of light given off by hot ionized hydrogen gas that could make it all the way from the heart of the galaxy to Earth, with very little loss of these light signals along the way. The resulting image is pictured below. It shows the location of the black hole marked with a crosshair, and the detected cloud of cool gas orbiting around it. Gas moving away from Earth is shown in red, while gas moving toward Earth is shown in blue.

(Image credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), E.M. Murchikova; NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello)

Space.com: Magnetic Muzzle

For a long time now, scientists have been comparing Sagittarius A* to other black holes known to exist at the centers of other galaxies. It seems that our own black hole is much quieter than its peers, and New observations, taken by NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) mission, reveal unprecedented information about the strong magnetic field lines at the center of the galaxy. Researchers believe that the magnetic field may suppress some of the activity that’s normally observed in other black holes. The image below shows magnetic field lines drawn over the debris field inhabited by Sagittarius A*

(Image: © Dust and magnetic fields: NASA/SOFIA; Star field image: NASA/Hubble Space Telescope)

LiveScience: High-Energy Jets

Directing our attention back to the galaxy M87, NASA’s Jet propulsion Laboratory released another Image, (pictured below) focused on the black hole at its center. Rather than showing a close-up, this image displays the whole stellar neighborhood of M87’s center, which includes the huge plasma jets that are being ejected from the hole at near-light speeds. This serves as visual evidence that black holes are not altogether inescapable, as is a popular belief in sci-fi.

A NASA image shows the M87 galaxy, in the middle of which is the black hole that was imaged for the first time earlier this month (bottom-most box). The top zoomed-in box shows the shockwaves caused by jets of plasma spewed out from the black hole.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/IPAC/Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
Image compiled and captioned by LiveScience

Business Insider: Portals?

Now we’ll move dangerously close to sci-fi. Physicists have continued messing around with the theoretical physics of black holes, and have decided that you probably won’t be stretched into spaghetti if you were to cross the event horizon of a black hole. In fact, a number of physicists believe that there may actually be support for the idea that large, slowly rotating black holes may actually serve as portals to another point in space, and possibly time. Is this true? We won’t know for sure for a long time yet. For now, only God and Matthew McConaughey know.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading, and enjoy the weekend.

-Sal

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