Who said that only planets from our Solar System, such as Saturn, Jupiter, or Uranus, are allowed to have rings? It seems that the same thing can be applied to black holes as well, those elusive cosmic objects that astronomers still have trouble understanding how they work.
According to BGR, NASA has used the Chandra X-ray Observatory to capture a new photo of a black hole located roughly 7.800 light-years away from Earth and that’s surrounded by rings. V404 Cygni is the binary system where the black hole is located. The rings belong to material from the companion star of the black hole, and X-ray images were used to have a better look at the rings.
Huge Rings Around a Black Hole, This image features a spectacular set of rings around a black hole, captured using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory.
Image Credit X-ray: NASA/CXC/U.Wisc-Madison/S. Heinz et al.; Optical/IR: Pan-STARR pic.twitter.com/ON2WpZuxmr— Black Hole (@konstructivizm) July 29, 2022
We were so glad to find out in late June that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will offer extra emphasis on the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A that’s located at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. James Webb will be teaming up with the Event Horizon Telescope in order to study the supermassive black hole in more detail.
The core of our galaxy is also the region where most of the stars exist, and that should be an extra reason to study the area. Who knows what astronomers might be able to find?
There are countless black holes out there in the Milky Way galaxy, not to mention in the entire Universe! Some astronomers even estimate that there are as many black holes as stars, so one thing’s for sure: scientists will never run out of homework! A black hole is a lot more difficult to spot than a star, and you have already guessed one of the reasons. Black holes don’t emit light; instead, they absorb it as soon as it gets too close.
