Description

The supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy fumes in violent silence. Pictured here, a superheated blob of electrons gets shredded apart and shoots around the accretion disk. The EHT spotted this hotspot—the first of its kind to be observed—during observations of Sgr A* in 2017. 

The supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy (Sgr A*) fumes in violent silence. Pictured here, a superheated blob of electrons gets shredded apart and shoots around the accretion disk, desperately trying to escape. The Event Horizon Telescope spotted this hotspot—the first of its kind to be observed—during observations of Sgr A* in 2017. We reported the unprecedented observation in our paper “Orbital motion near Sgr A*: Constraints from polarimetric ALMA observations” (DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202244493). The Event Horizon Telescope is a vast network of radio telescopes linked together to produce a single interferometer with an aperture the size of planet Earth. We used this instrument to take the first and second images of a black hole. This artwork is my visualization of the hotspot we detected, produced for the press campaign for this exciting discovery. I produced this artwork in the free and open-source modeling and rendering software Blender (blender.org).