The world got its first glimpse of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy on Thursday, even if it’s blurry.
Astronomers believe that almost all galaxies, including our own, have gigantic black holes at their centers, from which matter and light cannot escape, making it extremely difficult to image them. Gravity chaotically bends and twists light as it plunges into this abyss of superheated gas and dust.
The artificially colored image was released Thursday by the international consortium that maintains the Event Horizon Telescope, a collaboration of eight synchronized radio telescopes around the world. In previous attempts, the black hole in our galaxy was too accelerated to get a good image.
Feryal Ozel of the University of Arizona announced the new image of what he called “the gentle giant at the center of our galaxy.”
The black hole in the Milky Way is called Sagittarius A (asterisk) and is located near the edge of the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpio. Its mass is 4 million times that of the Sun.
This is not the first image of a black hole. The same group distributed the first in 2019, from a galaxy 53 million light years away. The Milky Way’s black hole is much closer: it is 27,000 light-years away. One light year is equal to 9.5 billion kilometers.
The project cost almost 60 million dollars, with a contribution of 28 million from the National Science Foundation of the United States.
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