Sagittarius A* tagged posts

Like most galaxies, the Milky Way hosts a supermassive black hole at its center. Called Sagittarius A*, the object has captured astronomers’ curiosity for decades. And now there is an effort to image it directly.

Catching a good photo of the celestial beast will require a better understanding of what’s going on around it, which has proved challenging due to the vastly different scales involved...

Observations made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have revealed for the first time that a star orbiting the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way moves just as predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity...

Infant stars, like those recently identified near the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, are surrounded by a swirling disk of dust and gas. In this artist’s conception of infant solar system, the young star pulls material from its surroundings into rotating disk (right) and generates outflowing jets of material (left). Credit: Bill Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

Earliest phase of star formation ever observed in highly hostile environment. ALMA has revealed the telltale signs of 11 low-mass stars forming perilously close – within 3 light-years – to the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). At this distance, tidal forces driven by the supermassive black hole should be energetic enough to rip apart clouds of dust and gas before they can form stars.

The presenc...

Sagittarius A*. This image was taken with NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Credit: Public domain

A team of researchers from around the world is getting ready to create what might be the first image of a black hole. The project is the result of collaboration between teams manning radio receivers around the world and a team at MIT that will assemble the data from the other teams and hopefully create an image. The project has been ongoing for ~20 years as members have sought to piece together the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).

Each of the 12 participating radio receiving teams will use equipment that has been installed for the project to record data received at a wavelength of 230GHz during April 5 through the 14th...