Magnetic field spotted surrounding Milky Way’s supermassive black hole

Washington Post : Like many galaxies, the Milky Way has a supermassive black hole—Sagittarius A—at its center surrounded by an accretion disk full of magnetized material. The resulting magnetic field that forms around the black hole’s event horizon is thought to impact both the rate at which the black hole consumes material and the way in which radiation is formed into jets that shoot away from the black hole. A team led by Avery Broderick of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the University of Waterloo used the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of radio telescopes across the globe, to get the first look ever at the magnetic field surrounding Sagittarius A. The radio telescopes let the researchers look for light polarized in a way that signifies it was affected by a magnetic field. They then used that signal to reconstruct the structure of the magnetic field itself. In some areas the magnetic field was patterned and orderly, and in others it was not. Broderick says that with further study they should be able to fully map the event horizon in a few years and determine which areas of the magnetic field are responsible for the high-energy radiation jets.