Imlisanen Jamir
Humanity’s understanding of the universe, more specifically our own galaxy—the Milky Way expanded dramatically last week.
On May 9, NASA released the infrared test images of the Large Magellanic Cloud, taken after the final alignment of the James Webb space telescope’s golden mirror segments.
This is the result of collaborative efforts between scientists around the world. The black hole, known as Sagittarius A, is 27,000 light-years from earth on one of the spiral arms of our Milky Way galaxy. The images were captured by the collective effort of 300 scientists, 80 institutions and eight radio telescopes working in tandem under the name Event Horizon Telescope project (EHT).
It is only the second-ever direct image of a black hole, after the same team unveiled a historic picture of a more distant black hole in 2019.
While this development does not seem to have any tangible effect on everyday lives of people on earth, every once in a while you have to pinch yourself and remember that this is the black hole at the centre of our galaxy. That is kind of cool.
Scientists have long thought that a supermassive black hole hidden deep in the chaotic central region of our galaxy was the only possible explanation for the bizarre things that happen there—such as giant stars slingshotting around an invisible something in space at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.
Yet they’ve been hesitant to say that outright. For example, when astronomers Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez shared a portion of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on Sagittarius A*, their citation specified that they were awarded for “the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy,” not the revelation of a “black hole.” The time for that sort of caution has expired.
Sagittarius A appears to be a very stable “gentle” black hole by the standards of more destructive black holes believed to be populating our galaxy and the universe beyond. The EHT project, like the Webb Telescope, will continue gathering information for decades. Every day that scientists pore over the information coming in from the furthest corners of the cosmos brings us closer to understanding how our universe operates.
This has been one of the most consequential weeks in astronomy ever. The James Webb telescope is now a million miles away from us and will begin transmitting unprecedented images of our universe this summer. The wild thing is that these breakthroughs promise wilder days to come.
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