This is the first - ever look at Sagittarius A * , the supermassive black hole that sits at the Congress of Racial Equality of our galaxy , the Milky Way . Thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration that brought us thefirst - ever mental image of a back holewe now know what this cosmic behemoth in our nook of the universe of discourse expect like .
The momentous image was accompanied by observation in X - rays byNASA ’s Chandra observatory . Together these provide phenomenal new insights into the most important resident at the heart of the Milky Way . Among these , the team discovered that the twist bloc of Sagittarius A * is almost pointing instantly at Earth . The EHT team ’s results are being publishedThe Astrophysical Journal Letters .
“ We were stunned by how well the sizing of the gang agreed with predictions from Einstein ’s Theory of General Relativity , " said EHT Project Scientist Geoffrey Bower from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics , Academia Sinica , said in astatement . " These unprecedented observations have greatly better our apprehension of what happens at the very centre of our galaxy , and offer up new perceptivity on how these jumbo black holes interact with their environs . "
As supermassive pitch-dark holes go , Sagittarius A * – pronounced “ A star ” – is not the most massive , but it still packs over 4 million times the quite a little of our Sun in anevent horizonthat is about 12 million kilometre ( 7.5 million mile ) across . That ’s 30 times the Earth - Moon distance .
That ’s quite the size but when it comes to observing it , it does n’t make it wanton . First of all , black maw are by their very nature bleak . Nothing , not even sparkle can get by their gravity . So we are not ensure Sagittarius A * directly , we ’re actually seeing the radio undulation around the event horizon , the " Earth’s surface " of the shameful muddle , or the boundary between the black yap and the quietus of the cosmos . The event horizon is the threshold where to escape the pull of the black mess you ’d need to move quicker than the speed of brightness level . It ’s the shadow of the result view of the black hole that astronomers managed to snap .
ignominious hole are smother by an accumulation disk , a compressed spinning platter of gas , dust , and stellar junk that orbits the black golf hole , not quite flow in . We can see this disk because the immense force of the black fix ’s gravitation accelerates the spinning mote and they smash into each other , release X - shaft and gamma rays in visible visible radiation , which allow us to observe – and now take photograph . So Sagittarius A * is there , but what we are seeing is how it warps gravity and thus the hot blood plasma around itself .
The second challenge is its length . At more or less 26,600 clean - years away , Sagittarius A * is a tiny object to view . It ’s the equivalent of seeing an particle at about an arm ’s duration , or a donut on the Moon . To reach out that incredible resolution , you ask an tremendous telescope or you want to be very apt with physics . The Event Horizon Telescope collaboration did the latter to create the former .
Thanks to a technique known as Very Long Base Interferometry , it is possible to combine observations from radio telescopes that are part on Earth by a sure length in a way that makes them equivalent to a scope the size of their interval . The Event Horizon Telescope has observatories across the reality from Greenland and Antarctica to Europe and Hawai’i via North and South America . Together , they dissemble as a scope as big as the Earth .
This groundbreaking quislingism release the historic firstimage of M87 * – the asterisk symbolizes a fateful hole in astronomy – in 2019 , with incredible follow - ups including themost accurate images of M87*yet and thefirst image of the magnetic fieldat the border of a back hole . Sagittarius A * is 1,600 times smaller than M87 * . The inmost stable orbit is about 4.5 loose - minutes instead of weeks like the great physical object . That means that the surroundings around Sagittarius A * changes more quickly , which made creating this image much more thought-provoking .
The collaboration impart keep campaigns in 2021 and 2022 witheven more telescopes , expanding their reflexion to other physical object , and with the hope to go beyond still image andreveal the first - ever footageof a changing supermassive black hole .
