![]() Doeleman compared that research to finding bones with teeth marks on the jungle floor and concluding there is a large predator in the area. Previous Nobel Prize-winning research has demonstrated that the supermassive compact object at the center of the Milky Way must be a black hole, based on the way that its gravity affects nearby stars. "It's a wonderful time to be alive," he added. If we're ever going to learn something that is completely unknown to us, it will be from doing something like studying black holes," Shep Doeleman, an astrophysicist at Harvard University and founding director of the EHT collaboration, told Insider ahead of Thursday's announcement. "Understanding black holes, at any level, addresses fundamental mysteries of the universe. ![]() A major astronomical mystery is how black holes and their galaxies evolve together. Scientists think every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, from the very early days of the galaxy's birth. "This tells us that general relativity governs these objects up close, and any differences we see further away must be due to differences in the material that surrounds the black holes," Markoff said. "We were all amazed that the image of Sagittarius A* looked so similar to the image of the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy," Sera Markoff, co-chair of the EHT Science Council and astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam, told reporters on Thursday. ![]() Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration/Maunakea Observatories via APįor many EHT scientists, the next step was obvious: turn this groundbreaking cosmic lens to the heart of the Milky Way. The first image ever made of a black hole, by the Event Horizon Telescope, released in April 2019. To achieve the photographic feat, the researchers linked telescopes across the planet to focus on the same object all together, creating a virtual observatory the size of Earth. ![]() That picture showed a supermassive black hole at the center of another galaxy called Messier 87, or M87, more than 50 million light-years away. In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope captured the first-ever image of a supermassive black hole located 53.5 million light-years away. "This appears the same size in the sky as a donut on the Moon," she said at a press conference. Sara Issaoun of Harvard, an EHT collaborator, said that researchers gathered direct evidence that Sagittarius A* is a black hole, with a size of about 52 microarcseconds in the sky. Xavier Barcons, director general of the European Southern Observatory, said at a press conference that the groundbreaking result is a timely reminder of what we can achieve when countries work together. Researchers took this stunning photo through the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an international collaboration that involves 300 international scientists and eight radio observatories around the world. That disk allows scientists to capture the black hole's silhouette, since the object swallows all forms of light, making it impossible to photograph directly. In the photo, a brilliant fuzzy ring of orange and yellow glows around a dark center - the accretion disk, a swirl of superheated material, circling the event horizon, where not even light can escape the black hole's gravity. Research institutions across the planet unveiled the picture in simultaneous press conferences on Thursday. Hundreds of scientists worked together to capture the first-ever image of the Milky Way's central black hole, called Sagittarius A* (pronounced "A-star"). In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope captured the first-ever image of a supermassive black hole.Ī glimpse of Sagittarius A* will help us understand the evolution of our galaxy, researchers said.įor the first time, take a good look at the supermassive black hole churning at the center of our galaxy. Event Horizon Telescope collaborationĪ new image reveals the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way for the first time. The first image of Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.
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