Scientists Turned the James Webb to Examine Black Hole at Center of Our Galaxy and Saw Something Wild

[Pelican Press 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Scientists Turned the James Webb to Examine ****** Hole at Center of Our Galaxy and Saw Something Wild

The James Webb Space Telescope has peered 13 billion years in the past and tens of

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

from our planet.

And in a recent experiment, scientists decided to look deep into a ****** hole that’s way closer to home — where they were met with an explosive light show.

As 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, scientists at Northwestern University turned the groundbreaking space telescope onto Sagittarius A*, the central ****** hole at the heart of our Milky Way Galaxy that’s

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

away from Earth, to see what its sensitive instruments would pick up.

In the most detailed look at that ****** hole ever undertaken, the astrophysicists observed incredible flares of light spewing out of Sagittarius A* that CNN described as resembling pyrotechnics.

As the researchers explained in a new paper

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, these types of flares usually burst out of accretion disks, or swirling disks of hot gas and dust. Though they’re not completely sure of its origin, the scientists behind this discovery say they think it came from an accretion disk located just beyond the ****** hole’s event horizon — a region with gravity so dense that even light can’t escape.

“In our data, we saw constantly changing, bubbling brightness,” Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, a physics and astronomy professor at Northwestern who was the study’s lead author, told CNN. “And then *****! A big burst of brightness suddenly popped up. Then, it calmed down again.”

As Yusef-Zadeh acknowledges, these fantastic flares appear to be happening at random.

“We couldn’t find a pattern in this activity,” he said. “The activity profile of this ****** hole was new and exciting every time that we looked at it.”

Though they’re

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, astronomers are able to “see” ****** holes because of their effect on the things around them. Anything that wanders too close to one gets sucked into its gravitational pull. Any dust and gas that gets pulled in starts to swirl super-fast in that maelstrom, forming accretion disks that heat up as they “feed” the ****** hole.

While the mechanism that fuels ****** holes is pretty well understood, astrophysicists don’t know exactly why these galaxy-powering bodies emit these bright, energetic flares. According to Yusef-Zadeh, the flares witnessed in Sagittarius A* are singular even for such mysterious motions.

“Flares are expected to happen in essentially all supermassive ****** holes, but our ****** hole is unique,” he explained. “It is always bubbling with activity and never seems to reach a steady state.”

Over a ******* of a year, the researchers watched Saggitarius A* in eight-to-ten-hour increments. During that time, as Yusef-Zadeh explained, “we noticed changes in every observation.”

“We saw something different each time,” the scientist told CNN, “which is really remarkable.”

More on James Webb discoveries: Scientists Surprised to Realize Red Dots in James Webb Images Are ****** Holes

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

#Scientists #Turned #James #Webb #Examine #****** #Hole #Center #Galaxy #Wild

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up