LOS ANGELES, May 12, 2022 (Xinhua) Astronomers revealed the first image of the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way on Thursday.
This image was produced by an international research team called the Event Horizon Telescope, using observations from a global network of radio telescopes.
The US National Science Foundation said in a statement that this is the first direct visual evidence confirming the existence of a black hole, known as “Sagittarius A star”, in the center of the Milky Way.
The black hole is about 27,000 light-years away from Earth and has a mass 4 million times the mass of the Sun, astronomers say.
The Foundation explained that the efforts aimed at revealing the first image of the black hole were made through the ingenuity of more than 300 researchers from 80 institutes around the world who together make up the collaborative (Event Horizon Telescope) project.
The foundation indicated that “although we cannot see the black hole itself, because it is completely dark, the glowing gas around it reveals a clear imprint: a dark central region, called the ‘shadow’, surrounded by a bright ring-like structure.”
The new view captures light that is curved by the black hole’s strong gravity.
“We were astonished by the extent to which the size of the ring matched the predictions made in Einstein’s general theory of relativity,” said Jeffrey Power, project scientist with the Event Horizon Telescope.
“These unprecedented observations greatly improve our understanding of what is happening at the center of our galaxy and provide new insights into how these supermassive black holes interact with their surroundings,” Power added.
The breakthrough comes after the collaborative Event Horizon Telescope project released the first image of a black hole, called “M87 Star”, in the center of the distant galaxy Messier 87 in 2019.
“Now we can study the differences between these two supermassive black holes to get valuable new clues about how this important process works,” said project scientist Keichi Asada of the Event Horizon Telescope.
“We have images of two black holes – one at the big end and one at the small end of supermassive black holes in the universe – so we can go a lot further in testing how gravity behaves in these extreme environments than ever before,” Asada said.
Scientists are beginning to use the new data to test theories and models of how gas behaves around supermassive black holes. This process is not yet fully understood but is believed to play a key role in the formation and evolution of galaxies, the US National Science Foundation reports. /ts/