Magnetic Fields at Milky Way's Central Black Hole Revealed by Event Horizon Telescope

This feat was achieved using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) – a global network of radio telescopes that link together to function as one giant telescope the size of Earth. Since larger telescopes can provide greater detail, the EHT ultimately will resolve features as small as 15 micro-arcseconds. (An arcsecond is 1/3600 of a degree, and 15 micro-arcseconds is the angular equivalent of seeing a golf ball on the moon.)

The Event Horizon Telescope made observations at a wavelength of 1.3 mm. The team measured how that light is linearly polarized. On Earth, sunlight becomes linearly polarized by reflections, which is why sunglasses are polarized to block light and reduce glare. In the case of Sgr A*, polarized light is emitted by electrons spiraling around magnetic field lines. As a result, this light directly traces the structure of the magnetic field.

Sgr A* is surrounded by an accretion disk of material orbiting the black hole. The team found that magnetic fields in some regions near the black hole are disorderly, with jumbled loops and whorls resembling intertwined spaghetti. In contrast, other regions showed a much more organized pattern, possibly in the region where jets would be generated.

They also found that the magnetic fields fluctuated on short time scales of only 15 minutes or so.

“Once again, the galactic center is proving to be a more dynamic place than we might have guessed,” says Johnson. “Those magnetic fields are dancing all over the place.”

These observations used astronomical facilities in three geographic locations: the Submillimeter Array and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (both on Mauna Kea in Hawaii), the Submillimeter Telescope on Mt. Graham in Arizona, and the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA) near Bishop, California. As the EHT adds more radio dishes around the world and gathers more data, it will achieve greater resolution with the goal of directly imaging a black hole’s event horizon for the first time.

“The only way to build a telescope that spans the Earth is to assemble a global team of scientists working together. With this result, the EHT team is one step closer to solving a central paradox in astronomy: why are black holes so bright?” states Doeleman.