It’s like trying to photograph a moving car so that the image is not blurred. If you were to print that data out, the stack of paper would reach the moon! It has taken so long to process because of the motion of gas around Sgr A*, which, as seen from the Earth, changes over hours. The new image was processed from more than 5.5 petabytes of data acquired during the EHT’s observing run in 2017. Both the black hole and the ring of gas around it are rotating in the same direction. The image has also revealed that Sgr A* is rotating and is face-on to us in other words, we are not looking down on its poles. The two images are so similar because black holes are extremely simple objects, affected in the same way by gravity. Black holes, where physical laws are pushed to their limits, are superb testbeds for theories of gravity, magnetism and the behavior of matter in extreme environments. Initial studies of the image have revealed that Sgr A* confirms Einstein’s theory of general relativity to within an error margin of 10% this was similarly confirmed by the pioneering image of M87*. Confirms Einstein, reveals fascinating details Sgr A* in our Milky Way is quieter, consuming just a thousandth of that. But the two black holes are hugely different in mass as well as size: M87* has 6 billion times the mass of the sun as against Sgr A*’s 4 million solar masses.Īnd the rate at which the two black holes consume the material surrounding them is also vastly different: M87* is far more active and consumes the equivalent of 900 Earth-masses per day. The ring is more unevenly shaped than the near-circular ring around M87*. Visually, the image of Sgr A* looks remarkably similar to the one of M87*, with the difference that the glowing ring of gas around Sgr A* is more elliptical: less circular and instead more like a circle someone sat down on. The black hole shadow for M87* is slightly larger than the diameter of our entire solar system. M87’s black hole is vastly more massive than the black hole in our Milky Way. Astronomers call it M87* (pronounced M87-star). In 2019, the EHT presented the first-ever image of a black hole: the one at the center of the M87 galaxy, some 54 million light years away. This suggested that this object is a black hole & today’s image provides the first direct visual evidence of it. ? Scientists had previously seen stars orbiting around something invisible, compact & very massive at the centre of the #MilkyWay. This incredible scientific achievement is the result of the work of 300 scientists and engineers from many scientific institutions, working together around the world to create the EHT: a global array of radio telescopes linked together to form a radio telescope the size of the Earth. The actual black hole is at the center of the shadow but is, of course, invisible. Our Milky Way’s supermassive black hole – designated Sagittarius A* or simply Sgr A* (pronounced Sadg A-Star) – lies some 26,000 light-years away. In other words, if this black hole shadow was in place of our sun, its outer edge would nearly coincide with the orbit of the planet Mercury. The image shows a glowing ring of gas surrounding a dark area known as the black hole shadow, which measures around 72 million miles (115 million km) across. ![]() 1st direct image of Milky Way’s black holeĪt press conferences around the world on May 12, 2022, scientists from the Event Horizon Telescope ( EHT) and the European Southern Observatory ( ESO) revealed the first-ever direct image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. And it tells us things we didn’t know before, for example, that our Milky Way’s black hole is face-on to us. But this image is our galaxy’s black hole. It looks a lot like the earlier image of the giant black hole in the galaxy M87. ![]() ![]() Astronomers have obtained the 1st direct image of the Milky Way’s black hole, a giant some 4 million times the mass of our sun.
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