Scientists believe the environment immediately surrounding a black hole is tumultuous, featuring hot magnetized gas that spirals in a disk at tremendous speeds and temperatures.
Scientists believe the environment immediately surrounding a black hole is tumultuous, featuring hot magnetized gas that spirals in a disk at tremendous speeds and temperatures. Astronomical observations show that within such a disk, mysterious flares occur up to several times a day, temporarily brightening and then fading away. Now a team led by Caltech scientists has used telescope data and an artificial intelligence (AI) computer-vision technique to recover the first three-dimensional video showing what such flares could look like around Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*, pronounced sadge-ay-star), the supermassive black hole at the heart of our own Milky Way galaxy.
The 3D flare structure features two bright, compact features located about 75 million kilometers (or half the distance between Earth and the Sun) from the center of the black hole. It is based on data collected by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile over a period of 100 minutes directly after an eruption seen in X-ray data on April 11, 2017.
"This is the first three-dimensional reconstruction of gas rotating close to a black hole," says Katie Bouman, assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences, electrical engineering and astronomy at Caltech, whose group led the effort described in a new paper in Nature Astronomy.
Read more at California Institute of Technology
