![]() This is the first time that researchers have shown, in a single model, the full story of how gas travels in the center of the Milky Way - from being blown off by stars to falling into the black hole. “Here we have shown that our model of gas falling inwards from nearby stars reproduces that same pattern far better than previous models,” Ressler added. Fortunately, the flickering pattern encodes a lot of information. Ressler is supported by a grant to KITP from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.Ī video would be ideal, he noted, but as of now we can construct only blurry, flickering images. “But a single picture only tells part of the story,” said Ressler, a postdoctoral scholar at UCSB’s Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP). There has recently, and for good reason, been a lot of excitement about the new picture of the black hole in the center of our galaxy. In a recent paper submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters, UC Santa Barbara’s Sean Ressler, Lena Murchikova at the Institute for Advanced Study and Chris White at Princeton University were able to use this subtle flickering to construct the most accurate model to date of our own galaxy’s central black hole - Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) - providing insight into properties such as its structure and motion. ![]() While light cannot escape a black hole, the bright glow of rapidly orbiting gas (recall the 2019 images of M87’s black hole) has its own unique flicker. The perception of constant illumination is a mere illusion. Because the brain perceives only an average of the information it receives, this flickering is blurred. The light from an incandescent bulb seems steady, but it actually flickers 120 times per second.
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