Astronomers have captured polarized light coming from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, giving insight into its magnetic fields.
Astronomers have gotten their best view yet of the magnetic fields around the gargantuan black hole at the center of the Milky Way.). Polarized light has waves that wiggle in the same direction, such as up and down or left and right. Mapping such light often gives astronomers insights into underlying magnetic phenomena.
The magnetic field closest to the black hole is relatively strong, about 30 times that of Earth’s, though still only about as powerful as a fridge magnet, says astronomer Sara Issaoun of the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. It’s produced by charged particles in the hot dense plasma surrounding the black hole’s accretion disk, a collection of gas and dust spiraling into Sagittarius A*.
Magnetic structures previously spied encircling the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87 look remarkably like those now seen around the much smaller and less active black hole in the center of our galaxy . For comparison, 120 billion kilometers is roughly 25 times the distance between Neptune and the sun, and 60 million kilometers is approximately the distance between Mercury and the sun.
Given such dissimilarities, “we expected to see different properties of their magnetic fields,” Issaoun says. The fact that both are highly structured suggests such fields are ubiquitous around black holes and affect how these cosmic vacuum cleaners grow and evolve.
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