 Greetings and welcome to the Astronomy Picture of the Day podcast. Today's picture for April 1st of 2024 is titled, Swirling Magnetic Field Around Our Galaxy's Central Black Hole. So what do we see here? Well here we see a close-up image of our central black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy and sometimes known as Sagittarius A star and this is done using radio telescopes in fact what is called the event horizon telescope which is using a number of radio telescopes around the world and combining their work together to get extremely high resolution images and which has allowed us to see the shadow of the event horizon of a black hole and that's what we're seeing at the center. Black holes themselves do not emit any kind of light or other energy however we can see the material around them before it crosses what is called the event horizon where that material has been energized to very high temperatures and here we see some of the streaks and the patterns there which are telling us that it is magnetized that there is a magnetic field very strong there and we can see that by looking at polarized light so the light becomes polarized or going in single directions and we can see that in the detailed images now that allows us to study not only the central regions of our galaxy and that central black hole but it allows us to study the magnetic field of our galaxy where it is very intense in those intersections of the galaxy as well so we're learning more about this mysterious part of our galaxy something very hard to see and understand it's very well hidden by the dust and material within our galactic disk so if we try to look in this direction using ordinary visible light we see nothing and it's not that it's not emitting visible light it's just that there's so much material between us and the galactic center that all of that visible light is absorbed before it gets to us so it's really those longer wavelengths, the radio waves that are able to better penetrate that dust and allow us a look into that core and the event horizon telescope has been able to see these shadows on a couple of different galaxies now including our Milky Way and the galaxy known as M87 the large elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Virgo and the major galaxy in the Virgo cluster of galaxies so being able to better understand these helps us to understand how the disks of material form around the galaxy centers around those black holes and how jets are emitted jets of material are emitted not from the black hole as nothing can come out of the black hole but from the accretion disk around the black hole and that's part of what we're seeing here in this magnetized material that we see in the polarized light swirling around the central black hole at the center of our galaxy so that was our picture of the day for April 1st of 2024 it was titled swirling magnetic field around our galaxy's central black hole we'll be back again tomorrow for the next picture previewed to be corona vision so we'll see what that is about tomorrow and until then have a great day everyone and I will see you in class