It consumes far less of the gas swirling nearby than M87*, and is far fainter as a result. Sagittarius A* is a “gentle giant,” says Feryal Ozel, a member of the global collaboration that created this image.
(Right) Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. (Left) The first image of a black hole, M87*, taken in 2019. The Event Horizon Telescope team has already noted some striking differences. With this picture and data in hand, scientists are now unpacking how our own neighborhood black hole compares to the one already imaged. What was unveiled in the image matched what the laws of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity would predict: a bright ring surrounding a dark shadow-that silhouette being the light-sucking point of no return, the event horizon. As described in press conferences Thursday morning, the research team used a network of radio telescopes to capture the footprint of Sagittarius A*. Nobel Prize-winning research, looking at the orbits of nearby stars, calculated its mass would be 400 million times that of the sun. Astrophysicists have long observed plumes of gas and X-ray radiation that suggested a supermassive black hole lingered at the center of the galaxy. This colossal resident of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A*, resides 26,000 light years away from Earth. Captured by the Event Horizon Telescope array, it’s the first direct visual evidence of the presence of this black hole. This is the first image of Sagittarius A* (or Sgr A* for short), the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. On Thursday, the team unveiled that breakthrough: the first image of our nearest black hole neighbor in the heart of our galaxy. Now that the first picture of a black hole is practically a pop culture meme, how do you one-up that? In the past weeks, the Event Horizon Telescope team alluded to a new ‘breakthrough’ hiding in the Milky Way. Today, it’s possible to buy jewelry and t-shirts with that picture, drink out of a M87*-adorned coffee cup, or just make it your phone background. (Black holes are given an asterisk after the name of their location). That picture was a slightly blurry, red-and-orange doughnut-the best picture to date of the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy called Messier 87, which is called Messier 87* or M87*. How do you take a picture of something so dense that it absorbs the very light around it?īut three years ago, we got our first good look with help from the Event Horizon Telescope, which is actually multiple radio telescopes all linked together. It wasn’t long ago that the idea of capturing an image of a black hole sounded like a joke, or an oxymoron. Credit: Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Based on the summit of Maunakea Hawaii, the Submillimeter Array is one of the observatories taking part in the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, which aims to capture secrets of black holes.
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