For the first time, we’re able to see what a black hole at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy looks like. Alex Tetarenko, an astrophysics researcher with Texas Tech, contributed to the discovery. | via TexasStandard
, an astrophysics researcher with Texas Tech University, contributed to this discovery. She is a NASA Einstein Fellow with Texas Tech’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and spoke with the Texas Standard about the black hole and what’s going on inside it.Let’s describe the image, if we can. What I’ve seen online looks a bit like something of a red blob, a mystery blob, sort of out in a black abyss.
So what we’re observing is light at radio wavelengths. So this is light that has much longer wavelengths than our eye can see, which is optical light.We know that supermassive black holes likely exist at the center of all galaxies, but this one is our very own supermassive black hole right at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
So with with our galaxy, for example, it’s a spiral galaxy. So we have the center, and then we have all this gas and dust and spiral arms going around it. It’s almost kind of like a disk; we have a big disk circling around the center. Oh, quite a long time. The technology and instruments that we use have been developed for decades now, so it’s been quite a long journey for a lot of people. But the data that we actually took of Sagittarius A* was back in 2017, so we’ve been analyzing this data for about five years. And I know that seems like a long time, but it’s actually quite common in astronomy to take this amount of time to actually figure out what we’re seeing. You know, good science takes time.
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