Flaring in the Galactic Center
New insights into the supermassive black hole and its surroundings at the centre of the Milky Way
Researchers discovered that a true mass monster resides in the centre of our Milky Way primarily by observing stars that orbit around an invisible centre of mass. One star came as close to the centre as 90 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Only a huge mass concentration of comparatively 4.3 million suns in the centre could be responsible for this - a black hole. With further precise measurements, the researchers even tracked luminous gas swirling around the black hole not much further than Venus orbits around the Sun. The data is a treasure trove.
At the center of our Milky Way there is a black hole with a mass of 4.3 million solar masses – several teams have established this beyond any reasonable doubt over the past four decades. In 2020, this finding was even honoured by the Nobel Prize in Physics including for a director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Reinhard Genzel. Since then, the research has focused on using the Galactic Centre as a laboratory to test the theory of general relativity in the very strong gravitational field close to this black hole – and to pin down its properties with high precision.
The team at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics has now used GRAVITY, the near-infrared interferometer at ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer to closely monitor the emission from the region around the black hole and probe for extremely bright states: flares. Such flares occur once or twice per day, and the emission becomes bright enough that it is possible to trace the motion of surrounding gas. The team analysed flares observed during 2018, 2021 and 2022, for which GRAVITY simultaneously delivered position and polarisation measurements.
This combined data set allowed the team to determine that the mass of the black hole with high accuracy (the uncertainty is only 12.000 solar masses) to be 4.297 million solar masses, a strong and independent constraint to previous measurements. The new data also show that the mass has to be enclosed inside the flares’ radius of around nine gravitational radii, which is smaller than the orbital radius of the planet Venus around the Sun.
“The mass we derived now from the flares at just a few gravitational radii is compatible with the value measured from the orbits of stars at several thousand gravitational radii,” emphasizes Diogo Ribeiro, who was responsible for the theoretical modelling at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. “This strengthens the case for a single black hole at the center of the Milky Way.”
Studying the motion of this orbiting gas can also shed light on the formation history of the structures at the Galactic Center. The orientation of the flare orbits is close to that of a stellar disk observed at 100,000 gravitational radii, suggesting a physical connection. “It is great to see the repeated, similar behaviour of the flares,” points out Antonia Drescher, who analysed the polarimetric measurements. “All of them show a clockwise looped motion on the sky; all have a similar radius and a similar orbital period. This is really beautiful to see.”
Strong winds from the stars farther out probably fuel the accretion flow of gas, which carries the initial angular momentum down to scales close to the event horizon. “The amount of information from the polarization was extremely fruitful and we learn a lot about the physics in the Galactic Center region from the joint data set,” adds Ribeiro. The dynamics of the flares may even carry information on the spin of the black hole – an open question today.
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