It would perhaps be hubristic to expect to be able to understand everything about our local supermassive black hole after imaging it just once. "Now, we can learn some new physics and understand our own black hole better." "I think this is more exciting than if everything simply worked out," he said. This is a feature of Sagittarius A* that scientists are still trying to understand, although Chan does not think that a little mystery is a bad thing. (Image credit: Event Horizon Telescope collaboration) The real black hole appeared to be much quieter than the simulations predicted.Īn image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, a behemoth dubbed Sagittarius A*, revealed by the Event Horizon Telescope on May 12, 2022. In particular, most of the models seemed to stumble over the amount of turbulence-induced variability seen in the disk of hot plasma encircling Sagittarius A*. However, none pass all 11 - there was always something the researchers could not explain. "It is remarkable that we understand Sagittarius A* so well that we have some models pass 10 out of the 11 tests," Chan said. The scientists then conducted 11 tests on each simulation to see which ones most closely match the real image.
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All told, the project relied on 80 million CPU hours' worth of processing time - equivalent to 2,000 laptops running at full speed non-stop for a whole year - to produce 5 million simulated images.Įach of these simulations is unique, changing the values of various different properties: the spin ate of the black hole, the strength of its magnetic field, the amount of gas falling onto it, how much space-time is warped by gravity, the level of turbulence in the disk, and many more. To assemble the library, astronomers enlisted the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center and other similar instruments. Creating these simulations was almost as complex as taking the real images themselves.
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