The sublime beauty and the danger of physics is that sometimes things exist that we can never see. Which led scientists to ask: Was an unknown object, perhaps a cosmic string, weird one-dimensional defects in space-time that should be out there, somewhere, detected at the Milky Way’s galactic center in 2016? If yes, it could have profound implications for understanding gravity, space-time and the universe itself.
“These objects look like gas and behave like stars,” said co-author Andrea Ghez, UCLA’s Lauren B. Leichtman and Arthur E. Levine Professor of Astrophysics and director of the UCLA Galactic Center Group about a new class of bizarre objects with orbits ranging from about 100 to 1,000 years at the center of our galaxy, not far from the supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* that look compact most of the time and stretch out when their orbits bring them closest to the black hole.
“There must be hundreds of millions of black holes out there, but we know about only very few. Knowing what to look for should put us in a better position to find them,” says ESO astronomer Thomas Rivinius about the discovery of a black hole lying just 1000 light-years from Earth. Finding a black hole in a triple system so close by indicates that we are seeing just “the tip of an exciting iceberg.”
An image of annihilation: data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton has revealed a red giant star wandering too close to a supermassive black hole in a galaxy about 250 million light years from Earth. The black hole, located in a galaxy called GSN 069, has a mass about 400,000 times that of the Sun, putting it on the small end of the scale for supermassive black holes.
The world’s astronomers and scientists with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team describe their epic photo of galaxy M87’s gargantuan black hole and its place in the history of science. The episode also describes the EHT’s current mission to photograph the Milky Way’s central black hole. Scientific speculation about these enigmatic objects has ranged from their giving birth to our cosmos to being portals to another universe.
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The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, which published the first image of a black hole in the nearby radio galaxy M 87 has observed the finest detail ever seen in a jet produced by a supermassive black hole using the EHT data on the distant quasar 3C 279. that contains a black hole about one billion times more massive than our Sun in a galaxy 5 billion light-years away in the constellation Virgo that scientists classify as a quasar because an ultra-luminous source of energy at its center shines and flickers as gas falls into a giant black hole.
