![]() ![]() The researchers used eight telescopes from around the globe – located at the points where the white lines intersect – to act as a single, massive telescope. Scientists had previously been able to calculate that Sagittarius A* is 16 million miles (26 million kilometers) in diameter. The size of a black hole is defined by its event horizon – a distance from the center of the black hole within which nothing can escape. Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez later shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery. Their motions suggested that at the center of the Milky Way was a black hole 4 million times the mass of the Sun. ![]() They saw stars whirling around a dark object at speeds up to a third of the speed of light. In the 1980s, two teams of astronomers started tracking the motions of stars near this mysterious source of radio waves. For decades, astronomers have been measuring blasts of radio waves from an extremely compact source there. Sagittarius A* sits at the the center of our Milky Way galaxy, in the direction of the Sagittarius constellation. Chris Impey, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, explains how the team got this image and why it is such a big deal. "Our result is a consequence of the cutting-edge research that we are undertaking into quantum physics at the University of Sussex and it shines a new light on the quantum nature of black holes.On May 12, 2022, astronomers on the Event Horizon Telescope team released an image of a black hole called Sagittarius A* that lies at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. "The pin-drop moment when we realized that the mystery result in our equations was telling us that the black hole we were studying had a pressure-after months of grappling with it-was exhilarating. "Our work is a step in this direction, and although the pressure exerted by the black hole that we were studying is tiny, the fact that it is present opens up multiple new possibilities, spanning the study of astrophysics, particle physics and quantum physics."įolkert Kuipers, doctoral researcher in the school of Mathematical and Physical Science at the University of Sussex, said: "It is exciting to work on a discovery that furthers our understanding of black holes-especially as a research student. It is hoped that when quantum field theory is incorporated into general relativity, we might be able to find a new description of black holes. "If you consider black holes within only general relativity, one can show that they have a singularity in their centers where the laws of physics as we know them must breakdown. "Hawking's landmark intuition that black holes are not black but have a radiation spectrum that is very similar to that of a black body makes black holes an ideal laboratory to investigate the interplay between quantum mechanics, gravity and thermodynamics. I'm delighted that the research that we are undertaking at the University of Sussex into quantum gravity has furthered the scientific communities' wider understanding of the nature of black holes. Xavier Calmet, Professor of Physics at the University of Sussex, said: "Our finding that Schwarzschild black holes have a pressure as well as a temperature is even more exciting given that it was a total surprise. Following further calculations they confirmed their exciting finding that quantum gravity can lead to a pressure in black holes. The serendipitous discovery was made by Professor Xavier Calmet and Folkert Kuipers in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Sussex, and is published today in Physical Review D.Ĭalmet and Kuipers were perplexed by an extra figure that was presenting in equations that they were running on quantum gravitational corrections to the entropy of a black hole.ĭuring a discussion on this curious result on Christmas Day 2020, the realization that what they were seeing was behaving as a pressure dawned. The University of Sussex scientists have shown that they are in fact even more complex thermodynamic systems, with not only a temperature but also a pressure. Previous to that, black holes were believed to be inert, the final stages of a dying heavy star. In 1974 Stephen Hawking made the seminal discovery that black holes emit thermal radiation. ![]()
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