This achievement was considerably more difficult than for M87*, even though Sgr A* is much closer to us. “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.” “We have two completely different types of galaxies and two very different black hole masses, but close to the edge of these black holes they look amazingly similar,” said Sera Markoff, co-chair of the Event Horizon Telescope Science Council and a professor of theoretical astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The two black holes look remarkably similar, even though our galaxy’s black hole is more than a thousand times smaller and less massive than M87*.

The breakthrough follows the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration’s 2019 release of the first image of a black hole, called M87*, at the center of the more distant Messier 87 galaxy. It’s very cool to have this remarkable image where we can see the shadow of the black hole.” “These observations give us an unprecedented view of gravity in one of the most extreme environments in our universe. John Carlstrom, who directs the South Pole Telescope team. “Scientists have been investigating the object at the center of our galaxy since I was a student decades ago, and it is exciting to be part of an experiment that can definitively image the black hole that we know must be there,” said University of Chicago Prof. Its unique remote geographic location at the South Pole provides the Event Horizon Telescope its highest-resolution information and a 24-hour-a-day view of the galactic center.Įven though the South Pole Telescope is used primarily for a different scientific goal – it is one of the most sensitive instruments in the world built to measure the light left over from the Big Bang – its crew jumped at the chance to be part of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration. One of these telescopes was the South Pole Telescope, operated by an international collaboration led by the University of Chicago and located at NSF’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. The Event Horizon Telescope observed Sagittarius A* (known for short as Sgr A*, pronounced “sadge-ay-star”) on multiple nights, collecting data for many hours in a row, similar to using a long exposure time on a camera. To image it, the team created the powerful Event Horizon Telescope, which linked together eight existing radio observatories across the planet to form a single “Earth-sized” virtual telescope. The results are published May 12 in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.īecause the black hole is about 27,000 light-years away from Earth, it appears to us to have about the same size in the sky as a donut on the Moon. “These unprecedented observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very center of our galaxy, and offer new insights on how these giant black holes interact with their surroundings.” “We were stunned by how well the size of the ring agreed with predictions from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity,” said Event Horizon Telescope Project Scientist Geoffrey Bower from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei. The new view captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole, which is four million times more massive than our Sun. This strongly suggested that this object - known as Sagittarius A* - is a black hole, and today’s image provides the first direct visual evidence of it.Īlthough we cannot see the black hole itself, because it is completely dark, glowing gas around it reveals a telltale signature: a dark central region (called a “shadow”) surrounded by a bright ring-like structure. Scientists had previously seen stars orbiting around something invisible, compact, and very massive at the center of the Milky Way. The image is a long-anticipated look at the massive object that sits at the very center of our galaxy. The image was produced by a global research team called the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, using observations from a worldwide network of radio telescopes including the University of Chicago-affiliated South Pole Telescope. This result provides overwhelming evidence that the object is indeed a black hole and yields valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the centre of most galaxies. Astronomers have unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy.

Blackhole photo