This video shows an animation of a hot spot, a bubble of hot gas, in orbit around Sagittarius A*, a black hole four million times more massive than our Sun that resides at the centre of our Milky Way. While the black hole (centre) has been directly imaged with the Event Horizon Telescope, the gas bubble represented around it has not: its orbit and velocity are inferred from both observations and models. The team who discovered evidence for this hot spot — using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner — predicts the gas bubble orbits very close to the black hole, at a distance about five times larger than the black hole’s boundary or “event horizon”.
The astronomers behind the discovery also predict that the hot spot becomes dimmer and brighter as it goes around the black hole, as indicated in this animation. Additionally, they can infer that it takes 70 minutes for the gas bubble to complete an orbit, putting its velocity at an astonishing 30% of the speed of light.
Credit: EHT Collaboration, ESO/L. Calçada (Acknowledgment: M. Wielgus)
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