NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will soon be able to unveil hitherto unseen areas of the cosmos, including a massive, broody cosmic entity in the galaxy's heart.
JWST will contribute to ongoing global attempts to detect Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way's core.
The gravitational consequences of this enigmatic beast have been deduced, but visualizing the black hole itself has been difficult.
A group of more than 200 scientists worldwide presented the first photograph of a black hole in April 2019.
An array of radio telescopes used the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) to picture the black hole in the heart of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87).
Heated gas swirls around the region of the Milky Way galaxy’s supermassive black hole, illuminated in near-infrared light captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Released in 2009 to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy, this was the sharpest infrared image ever made of the galactic center region. NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in December 2021, will continue this research, pairing Hubble-strength resolution with even more infrared-detecting capability. Of particular interest for astronomers will be Webb’s observations of flares in the area, which have not been observed around any other supermassive black hole and the cause of which is unknown. The flares have complicated the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration’s quest to capture an image of the area immediately surrounding the black hole, and Webb’s infrared data is expected to help greatly in producing a clean image.
The EHT team created the image using data from eight telescopes on five continents for seven days.
M87 is 55 million light-years away from Earth and has a mass of 6.5 billion times the Sun, making it far bigger than Sagittarius A*.
However, EHT has now shifted its focus to more familiar territory.
Sagittarius A* shows strange flashing flares, making the imaging procedure considerably more challenging every hour, Webb officials noted in late 2021.
Webb will contribute infrared photos of the black hole area and data on when flares are present, which will be helpful to the EHT team.
A woman stands near a model of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland on April 2, 2015.
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Saggittarius A* Explained
Black holes are tight, compact collections of stuff in space with an intense gravitational pull that not even light can escape.
Every galaxy, according to scientists, has a black hole in its core.
Sera Markoff, an astronomer on the Webb Sgr A* research team and currently vice chairperson of EHT's Science Council, said in a statement: "The reason that scientists and space agencies across the world put so much effort into studying black holes is because they are the most extreme environments in the known universe, where we can put our fundamental theories, like general relativity, to a practical test."
Because black holes are the most severe conditions in the known universe, where we can put our fundamental ideas, such as general relativity, to a practical test, scientists and space agencies throughout the globe devote so much time and effort to investigating them."
Scientists gave the Milky Way's black hole the name Sagittarius A* in 1974. Sagittarius A* is around 27,000 light-years away from Earth and has a mass of 4 million times that of the Sun.
Scientists have never personally viewed Sagittarius A*, yet they know it exists because of its impact on the surroundings. The star S0-2, for example, is on a 16-year elliptical orbit around the black hole
JWST's Role in Black Hole
A comparable picture of Sagittarius A* is now being created by EHT scientists. Sagittarius A*, on the other hand, is a little more difficult. Sagittarius A* is nearly 1,000 times smaller than M87, despite being closer to our perspective from Earth.
Plasma, or murky ionized gas, that sits between ground-based observatories and the black hole as they stare through the planet of the Milky Way galaxy distorts the image of Sagittarius A*.
The material encircling Sagittarius A* also includes flashing flares that change the pattern of light on an hourly basis.
Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, a professor at Northwestern University and principal investigator on the Webb program to observe Sgr A*, said that The Milky Way's supermassive black hole is the only one reported to exhibit this sort of flare, which makes photographing the region challenging. Still, it also makes Sagittarius A* more scientifically fascinating.
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