![]() This would be unprecedented, but why not possible?Īt the time, there was and still is a strange split in the community: Either one would work on jets from black holes, mainly related to radio astronomy and later, gamma-rays, or one would work on accretion disks, mainly working with optical or X-ray data. We then wondered whether the radio emission of Sgr A* could be related to the jets - outflows of ionized matter emitted along the axis of rotation - seen in much more powerful quasars and radio galaxies, but at much lower levels. We concluded that these properties were extremely low - we called it a “black hole on a starvation diet”. A few months earlier we had investigated the accretion rate and luminosity of Sgr A*, i.e., how much matter was falling towards the black hole and how much energy was dissipated into radiation. ![]() Surprisingly, there was no clear understanding of what the nature of the radio and sub mm-emission of Sgr A* were. Modeling Sgr A* - if you know one black hole, you know them all ![]() So, when new observations of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) - the hypothesized supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy - came about in the 1990’s, it seemed clear that something exciting was in the air and as new observational opportunities abounded, the hunt for the supermassive black hole in our galaxy was on! The image has a width of 775 light years. Sgr A* is the point in the bright central splotch. Radio image of the galactic center region made with the MeerKat Telescope Array in South Africa at 1.3 GHz. Everybody was talking about black holes, but they were still seen as exotic and unproven - ruling paradigm, but not a physical reality (yet). When I started with my Ph.D., I witnessed an ambiguous situation. Was it a force at all? How would it relate to quantum physics? One of the most mysterious objects that encapsulated all these questions seemed to be black holes. The ability to make an impact was getting more difficult and the next big thing was perhaps decades away.īut there was still one major, unsolved question: What is the true nature of gravity? After all, it was the last force resisting assimilation into the Standard Model of physics. However, it was also clear that particle physics was getting too big. Particle physics was at its peak and I was impressed by the large collaborations and the success of the Standard Model in ruling our world view. Here, I try to tell the story from my personal perspective and mention a few of the lessons I learned along the way.Īs a student, I was drawn into physics by the fundamental questions about space, time, and matter that it addressed. Witnessing how such a process unfolds from the beginning was an interesting experience for me. It is the result of a long scientific but also sociological process: the pioneering work of a few and the collective effort of many, understanding the basic physics, long term visions, sudden revelations, technological game changers, continuously growing incremental insights, and in the end, also some luck. Imaging a black hole does not just happen.
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