Exciting! Telescope Finds Clue to Black Hole Growth

[Jason]

Telescope Finds Clue to Black Hole Growth

A new discovery, published today in the journal Science, has greatly deepened our understanding black holes, which are believed to be the gravitational engines at the centers of most galaxies, including our own. Using an array of telescopes that spans the globe, astronomers detected evidence of magnetic fields near Sagittarius A*, the 4.5-million-solar-mass black hole at the center of the Milky Way. "Understanding these magnetic fields is critical. Nobody has been able to resolve magnetic fields near the event horizon until now," says lead author Michael Johnson of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

Decades of theoretical work, including enormous computer simulations, have painted a picture of how strong horizon-scale magnetic fields near the black hole contribute to its growth. Now that this international collaboration has discovered high levels of polarization in the radio emissions from Sagittarius A*, physicists have proof that these magnetic fields indeed exist.

http://www.astrowatch.net/2015/12/teles ... -hole.html

[Jason]

http://phys.org/news/2015-12-event-hori ... netic.html

[Jason]

Suck it Seth. Live long and suck it.

[JimC]

Little by little, observation by observation, we refine our models of black holes. (Which are called Collapsed Stellar Objects by Russian scientists, since a direct translation of black hole into Russian is standard slang for an arsehole...)

And unlike putative gods, they actually exist and have observable effects...

(both black holes and arseholes...)