Astronomers managed to see a colossal black hole in the center of our galaxy in an unprecedented approximation.

Combining the data obtained by telescopes located in Hawaii, Arizona and California, scientists looked into a supermassive black hole that reigns in the active center of the Milky Way - and saw structures with a resolution of 37 angular microseconds in it (this looks like a baseball from Earth, if anyone) some will throw him to the moon). This is truly an unparalleled achievement.

A rotating black hole through the eyes of an artist: an absolutely black sphere represents the event horizon. It is surrounded by a brightly radiating accretion disk of matter falling into a hole. A white pole emanating from its pole is a gas jet thrown away at speeds close to the speed of light.

To achieve this, a group of scientists led by Sheperd Doleman (Sheperd Doeleman) used the VLBI technique, which allowed us to investigate the radio emission coming from the powerful and compact source Sagittarius A * , which is 26 thousand light years away, right in the center galaxies. The signals recorded by telescopes in different parts of the world were combined in such a way as if they were received by a single telescope with dimensions equal to the distance between these telescopes - in this case, about 4.5 thousand km.
')

A hot "center" of gas, rotating around a black hole. Its silhouette is strongly distorted by the most powerful attraction; the same can be said about the space-time continuum itself, which is depicted by a coordinate grid. In this illustration, we are looking at a hole in the direction of about 30 degrees relative to the plane of its disk.

“Until now, no one has been able to obtain such high-quality images of the center of the galaxy,” rejoices one of the co-authors of the study. “We saw it with a resolution of the scale of its event horizon — an area from which nothing can return, not even light.” The fact is that the longer the radiation wavelength, the faster it dissipates in flight through space. And if until now the VLBI technique allowed us to work with radio wavelengths of at least 3.5 mm, then the Doleman group managed to bring the resolution to 1.3 mm. This allowed to see objects with an angular resolution of 37 microseconds. According to their calculations, taking into account the distance to Sagittarius A *, the spatial resolution of the picture obtained by scientists was 48 million km (approximately 1/3 of the distance from us to the Sun).

So far, using only three telescopes, astronomers have managed to see only the general shape of this actively radiating region — it turned out to be about ten times denser than previously thought. However, it will take new research to say with certainty what exactly they saw - a shining gas disk around a black hole, a rotating gas "center", or a gas jet ejected by a hole in space. In any case, this is the first ever observation of a black hole in the history with a resolution of the order of its event horizon.

Event horizon - the line is just as speculative as an ordinary horizon. This is the boundary in the vicinity of a black hole, at which the rate of sliding of the space-time continuum itself inside the hole exceeds the speed of light. Starting from this area, nothing — even the most energetic radiation — can no longer break out of its tenacious embraces. By the way, it is in this area that another surprising event occurs - the “evaporation” of a black hole.

Inspired by the undoubted success, the Dolemann group intends to further improve its method and achieve even higher resolution. In addition, they intend to add new telescopes to the overall system and thereby also improve the result - in their opinion, they will be able to achieve data of at least 0.85 mm wavelength.

via Popular Mechanics