Full-polarization millimeter wavelength variability of Sagittarius A* during the 2018 EHT campaign
Abstract
Sagittarius A* (Srg A*), the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, provides a unique laboratory to study accretion dynamics and plasma processes near the event horizon. We investigated the variability and polarization properties of Srg A* using ALMA observations during the 2018 Event Horizon Telescope campaign. We analyzed high-cadence full-polarization light curves from ALMA at millimeter wavelengths, performed time-series analysis, and investigated the temporal behavior during an X-ray flare observed by Chandra on 2018 April 24. The variability characteristics are compared with expectations from standard accretion flow models. We find low variability in total intensity (), but significantly higher variability in linear and circular polarization (~ 30% and ~ 50%, respectively). A time-series analysis reveals red-noise variability, with power spectral densities between -2 and -3 across all Stokes parameters. Polarized intensity shows stable intra-day timescales, while total intensity exhibits more variable timescales, suggesting distinct emission regions, with polarization likely arising from a coherent structure. On April 24, a statistically significant inter-band delay in polarized intensity coincides with a near-simultaneous X-ray and millimeter peak that deviates from the typical delayed flare scenario. This event also features enhanced millimeter variability and coherent polarization loop evolution. The observed simultaneity challenges standard models of transient synchrotron emission with cooling delays, favoring instead a scenario of continuous energy injection in an optically thin region. Our results offer new constraints on the physical mechanisms driving variability in Srg A*, and provide key observational input for refining theoretical models of accretion and plasma behavior in the vicinity of supermassive black holes.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.10287,
title = {Full-polarization millimeter wavelength variability of Sagittarius A* during the 2018 EHT campaign},
author = {Ezequiel Albentosa-Ruiz and Jasmin E. Washington and Nicola Marchili and Iván Martí-Vidal and Ciriaco Goddi and Maciek Wielgus and Alejandro Mus and Angelo Ricarte and Daniel P. Marrone and León D. S. Salas and Yuhei Iwata and Douglas F. Carlos and Alexandra J. Tetarenko and Kotaro Moriyama and Vedant Dhruv and Kazunori Akiyama and Antxon Alberdi and Walter Alef and Juan Carlos Algaba and Richard Anantua and Keiichi Asada and Rebecca Azulay and Uwe Bach and Anne-Kathrin Baczko and David Ball and Mislav Baloković and Bidisha Bandyopadhyay and John Barrett and Michi Bauböck and Bradford A. Benson and Dan Bintley and Lindy Blackburn and Raymond Blundell and Katherine L. Bouman and Geoffrey C. Bower and Michael Bremer and Roger Brissenden and Silke Britzen and Avery E. Broderick and Dominique Broguiere and Thomas Bronzwaer and Sandra Bustamante and John E. Carlstrom and Andrew Chael and Chi-kwan Chan and Dominic O. Chang and Koushik Chatterjee and Shami Chatterjee and Ming-Tang Chen and Yongjun Chen and Xiaopeng Cheng and Pierre Christian and Ilje Cho and Nicholas S. Conroy and John E. Conway and Thomas M. Crawford and Geoffrey B. Crew and Alejandro Cruz-Osorio and Yuzhu Cui and Brandon Curd and Rohan Dahale and Jordy Davelaar and Mariafelicia De Laurentis and Roger Deane and Jessica Dempsey and Gregory Desvignes and Jason Dexter and Indu K. Dihingia and Sheperd S. Doeleman and Sergio A. Dzib and Ralph P. Eatough and Razieh Emami and Heino Falcke and Joseph Farah and Vincent L. Fish and Edward Fomalont and H. Alyson Ford and Marianna Foschi and Antonio Fuentes and Raquel Fraga-Encinas and William T. Freeman and Per Friberg and Christian M. Fromm and Peter Galison and Charles F. Gammie and Roberto García and Olivier Gentaz and Gertie Geertsema and Boris Georgiev and Roman Gold and José L. Gómez and Arturo I. Gómez-Ruiz and Minfeng Gu and Mark Gurwell and Kazuhiro Hada and Daryl Haggard and Ronald Hesper and Dirk Heumann and Luis C. Ho and Paul Ho and Mareki Honma and Chih-Wei L. Huang and Lei Huang and David H. Hughes and Shiro Ikeda and C. M. Violette Impellizzeri and Makoto Inoue and Sara Issaoun and David J. James and Buell T. Jannuzi and Michael Janssen and Britton Jeter and Wu Jiang and Alejandra Jiménez-Rosales and Michael D. Johnson and Adam C. Jones and Svetlana Jorstad and Abhishek V. Joshi and Taehyun Jung and Ramesh Karuppusamy and Tomohisa Kawashima and Garrett K. Keating and Mark Kettenis and Dong-Jin Kim and Jae-Young Kim and Jongsoo Kim and Junhan Kim and Motoki Kino and Jun Yi Koay and Prashant Kocherlakota and Yutaro Kofuji and Patrick M. Koch and Shoko Koyama and Carsten Kramer and Joana A. Kramer and Michael Kramer and Thomas P. Krichbaum and Cheng-Yu Kuo and Noemi La Bella and Sang-Sung Lee and Aviad Levis and Zhiyuan Li and Rocco Lico and Greg Lindahl and Michael Lindqvist and Mikhail Lisakov and Jun Liu and Kuo Liu and Elisabetta Liuzzo and Wen-Ping Lo and Andrei P. Lobanov and Laurent Loinard and Colin J. Lonsdale and Amy E. Lowitz and Ru-Sen Lu and Jirong Mao and Sera Markoff and Alan P. Marscher and Satoki Matsushita and Lynn D. Matthews and Lia Medeiros and Karl M. Menten and Izumi Mizuno and Yosuke Mizuno and Joshua Montgomery and James M. Moran and Monika Moscibrodzka and Wanga Mulaudzi and Hendrik Müller and Cornelia Müller and Gibwa Musoke and Ioannis Myserlis and Hiroshi Nagai and Neil M. Nagar and Dhanya G. Nair and Masanori Nakamura and Gopal Narayanan and Iniyan Natarajan and Antonios Nathanail and Santiago Navarro Fuentes and Joey Neilsen and Chunchong Ni and Michael A. Nowak and Junghwan Oh and Hiroki Okino and Héctor Raúl Olivares Sánchez and Tomoaki Oyama and Feryal Özel and Daniel C. M. Palumbo and Georgios Filippos Paraschos and Jongho Park and Harriet Parsons and Nimesh Patel and Ue-Li Pen and Dominic W. Pesce and Vincent Piétu and Aleksandar PopStefanija and Oliver Porth and Ben Prather and Giacomo Principe and Dimitrios Psaltis and Hung-Yi Pu and Venkatessh Ramakrishnan and Ramprasad Rao and Mark G. Rawlings and Luciano Rezzolla and Bart Ripperda and Jan Röder and Freek Roelofs and Cristina Romero-Cañizales and Eduardo Ros and Arash Roshanineshat and Helge Rottmann and Alan L. Roy and Ignacio Ruiz and Chet Ruszczyk and Kazi L. J. Rygl and Salvador Sánchez and David Sánchez-Argüelles and Miguel Sánchez-Portal and Mahito Sasada and Kaushik Satapathy and Saurabh and Tuomas Savolainen and F. Peter Schloerb and Jonathan Schonfeld and Karl-Friedrich Schuster and Lijing Shao and Zhiqiang Shen and Sasikumar Silpa and Des Small and Bong Won Sohn and Jason SooHoo and Kamal Souccar and Joshua S. Stanway and He Sun and Fumie Tazaki and Paul Tiede and Remo P. J. Tilanus and Michael Titus and Kenji Toma and Pablo Torne and Teresa Toscano and Efthalia Traianou and Tyler Trent and Sascha Trippe and Matthew Turk and Ilse van Bemmel and Huib Jan van Langevelde and Daniel R. van Rossum and Jesse Vos and Jan Wagner and Derek Ward-Thompson and John Wardle and Jonathan Weintroub and Robert Wharton and Kaj Wiik and Gunther Witzel and Michael F. Wondrak and George N. Wong and Qingwen Wu and Nitika Yadlapalli and Paul Yamaguchi and Aristomenis Yfantis and Doosoo Yoon and André Young and Ziri Younsi and Wei Yu and Feng Yuan and Ye-Fei Yuan and Ai-Ling Zeng and J. Anton Zensus and Shuo Zhang and Guang-Yao Zhao and Shan-Shan Zhao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.10287},
year = {2026}
}