I consider him to be one of the best of my generation of computationalists. Unlike our group at the University of Rochester, however, Gammie's research group studies black holes and the spinning disks of gas that form around them. Like me, he uses supercomputers to simulate the behavior of fluids in space (i.e gases or plasmas). The impossible was heavy on my mind last Wednesday as I found out just how close we were to seeing - as in taking actual pictures - of black holes.Ĭharles Gammie is a computational astrophysicist.
Has event horizon telescope seen a blackhole how to#
If there is one thing science is good for, it's going to extremes.Ī lot of science's history is just one story after another of people figuring out how to do something that, just a few years before, was thought to be impossible. The research appears in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters, titled “The population of the galactic center filaments: Position angle distribution reveal a degree-scale collimated outflow from Sgr A* along the galactic plane”.A jet emanating from galaxy M87 can be seen in this July 6, 2000, photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The new discovery remains filled with unknowns although it is possible the filaments originated with some kind of outflow from an activity that happened a few million years ago. In addition, the horizontal filaments appear to accelerate thermal material in a molecular cloud. Yusef-Zadeh estimates the horizontal filaments are about 6 million years old and they appear to be tied to activities in the galactic centre, pointing radially toward the centre of the galaxy where the supermassive black hole lies. Source – European Southern Observatory (ESO). It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an array which linked together eight existing radio observatories across the planet to form a single “Earth-sized” virtual telescope. It’s the first direct visual evidence of the presence of this black hole. This is the first image of Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. To pinpoint the filaments, Yusef-Zadeh’s team used a technique to remove the background and smooth the noise from MeerKAT images in order to isolate the filaments from surrounding structures. Yusef-Zadeh credits the new discovery to enhanced radio astronomy technology, particularly the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory’s (SARAO) MeerKAT telescope. It is satisfying when one finds order in the middle of a chaotic field of the nucleus of our galaxy.” By studying them, we could learn more about the black hole’s spin and accretion disk orientation. And we found that these filaments are not random but appear to be tied to the outflow of our black hole. We had to do a lot of work to establish that we weren’t fooling ourselves. Yusef-Zadeh says: “I was actually stunned when I saw these. The black hole itself is not seen instead, it is detected only through nearby objects whose behaviour is influenced by the black hole. The horizontal filaments look like the dots and dashes of Morse code, punctuating one side of Sagittarius A*. The filaments lie horizontally or radially, spreading out like spokes on a wheel from the black hole. These threads are much shorter than any previously seen and similar structures. The discovery has been led by Northwestern University’s Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, who reports on the new population of filaments. These structures are thought to have originated a few million years ago when outflow from our supermassive black hole interacted with surrounding materials. The finding is based on new radio telescope that show the mysterious filaments along the galactic plane, each measuring 5 to 10 light-years in length. Hundreds of horizontal filaments have been discovered in the centre of our galaxy – the Milky Way – and these point toward our central supermassive black hole ( Sagittarius A*). Huge bursts of radio energy emanating from the Milky Way were first observed by a university student - Copyright AFP/File Philip FONG
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