Astronomers today released the first ever image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy—or an image of its shadow at least.
Astronomers today released the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy—or at least a picture of its shadow. Eight radio observatories around the globe and more than 300 scientists joined forces to image the object known as Sagittarius A* , a feat thought impossible until just a few years ago. “It’s a truly impressive accomplishment,” says black hole expert Roger Blandford of Stanford University, who is not part of the team.
Although the black holes in the centers of galaxies have enormous masses—millions or billions of times that of the Sun—their intense gravity means their outer edge, the event horizon, is tiny in galactic terms. Sgr A*, which has a mass of 4 million Suns, has an event horizon that is just 15 times the size of the Earth-Moon distance. Imaging something so small from 27,000 light-years away presents a huge challenge for astronomers.
By 2017, after developing techniques for processing the data and enlisting radio telescopes worldwide, the team was ready toData came from eight observatories, from Hawaii to Spain and from Arizona to the South Pole. A key addition was the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, a group of 64 dishes with the combined collecting area of an 84-meter-wide telescope.
The three “knots” visible in the image might be clumps of bright swirling gas, but Özel says they could also be artifacts of observation process. “We don’t trust the knots that much,” she says. “They tend to line up with parts of the [EHT] array where we have the most telescopes.”studies of star orbits close to the black hole
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