London, Europe Brief News – For the first time, astronomers have captured an image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.
More than 27,000 light-years away, at the heart of our galaxy, lies a supermassive black hole, one that is more than four million times the mass of our sun. It has never been seen.
The historic image of what scientists call Sagittarius A*, captured by a worldwide telescope array called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) and released Thursday (May 12), confirms a black hole in the heart of the Milky Way feeding on a hydrogen gas. EHT is most famous for capturing the first-ever black hole image of M87’s supermassive black hole in 2019, but for scientists on the project, today’s image is a still more remarkable milestone.
“I wish I could tell you that second time is as good as the first one imaging black holes. But that wouldn’t be true. It is actually better,” Feryal Özel, EHT modeling lead and a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Arizona, said during a press conference Thursday.
Fortunately, this monster is a long, long way away – some 26,000 light-years in the distance – so there’s no possibility of us ever coming to any danger.
It’s their second such image after releasing in 2019 a picture of the giant black hole at the heart of another galaxy called Messier 87, or M87. That object was more than a thousand times bigger at 6.5 billion times the mass of our Sun.
“But this new image is special because it’s our supermassive black hole,” said Prof Heino Falcke, one of the European pioneers behind the EHT project.
“This is in ‘our backyard’, and if you want to understand black holes and how they work, this is the one that will tell you because we see it in intricate detail,” the German-Dutch scientist from Radboud University Nijmegen told BBC News.
