Nasa's 'James Webb Space Telescope' launches into orbit
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The James Webb telescope, described as the “world’s most expensive and powerful” of its kind, was launched last Christmas Day and reached its final destination Lagrange 2 late last month, a point in space a million miles away from Earth. Now, scientists at NASA will use the impressive satellite to study the ginormous black hole called Sagittarius Aor Sgr A that lies in the centre of the Milky Way.
So far, all other telescopes have had a difficult time studying this black hole, that flickers every hour.
The NASA scientists using the Webb telescope will be joined by the Event Horizon Telescope. (EHT), which captured the first-ever image of a black hole, M87*, back in 2019.
According to researchers, even though Sagittarius A is closer than M87, its flickering nature makes it a much more difficult target to capture.
They said: “While M87’s core presented a steady target, Sagittarius A* exhibits mysterious flickering flares on an hourly basis, which make the imaging process much more difficult,”
“Webb will assist with its own infrared images of the black hole region, providing data about when flares are present that will be a valuable reference to the EHT team.”
The flares occur when charge particles get accelerated around the black hole to higher energies, creating light emission.
The James Webb Telescope will eventually image Sagittarius A* in two infrared wavelengths from a point in deep space where it will be unhindered by stray light.
Since EHT comprises eight ground-based radio telescopes, scientists hope that the data collected from Webb will complement the ground-based network data from the EHT and create a clean, easy to interpret, image.
Astronomer Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, a professor at Northwestern University and principal investigator on the Webb program to observe Sgr A said: “Our galaxy’s supermassive black hole is the only one known to have this kind of flaring, and while that has made capturing an image of the region very difficult, it also makes Sagittarius A even more scientifically interesting.
“We want to know how the universe works, because we are part of the universe. Black holes could hold clues to some of these big questions.”
In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration was able to capture the first image ever recorded of a black hole.
The EHT captured an image of the black hole in the centre of galaxy M87 while the telescope was studying the event horizon, which is the area near a black hole past which nothing can escape from.
Black holes are among the most enigmatic stellar objects in the whole of the universe.
First predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity in 1915, they exist as points in time and space where the collapse of a large star leads to matter being infinitely compressed into an infinitely small amount of space
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