The flickering black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, has been elusive for existing telescopes to explore.
The nature of the black hole called Sagittarius A* makes it difficult to image, and will be joined by several telescopes.
The team will be working with the Telescope. The first-ever image of a black hole, M87*, was captured by eight ground-based radio telescopes.
The flickering nature of Sagittarius A* makes it a much more difficult target than the supermassive black hole in the Milky Way.
While M87's core presented a steady target, Sagittarius A* exhibits mysterious flickering flares on an hourly basis, which make the image process much more difficult.
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The light emission is caused by charged particles being accelerated around the black hole to higher energies.
Sagittarius A* will eventually be imaged in two wavelengths from a perch in deep space unimpeded by stray light. Since EHT is on the ground, the hope is that the data collected from Webb will complement the ground-based network data and create a cleaner, easy to interpret, image.
The information that will be provided by Webb and EHT will be used to study black holes, solar flares, and particle and plasma physics more generally.
We want to know how the universe works because we are part of it. The study's principal investigator said that black holes could hold clues to some of the big questions.
The first physical black hole was discovered in 1971 and the first EHT image of M87* in 2019: Einstein's black hole prediction was correct, according to the press release.
The hope is that this first collaboration between the two will allow for more telescope time in space in the future.
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