Supermassive black hole Milky Way

The Event Horizon Telescope has now produced images of two surprisingly different supermassive black holes: the one in the center of a galaxy called M87 and ...

"Only a trickle of material is actually making it all the way to the black hole." Although the material surrounding Sagittarius A* is moving around the event horizon inconveniently fast, our supermassive black hole nonetheless offers a much tamer environment near its surface than M87* does. "Imaging Sagittarius A* was a bit of a messier story than imaging M87*," Bouman said. And the challenge of Sagittarius A* was evident as scientists analyzed the data the EHT gathered as well. That's the monster hiding within M87, also known as M87*. This black hole is farther away from Earth, of course, but it's also much larger, and material moves around its event horizon at a more leisurely pace. In particular, the two black holes differ in how difficult it is to image material moving around its boundary, or event horizon.

A global team of researchers called the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration has released an image of our neighbourhood black hole, named Sagittarius A*. The ...

To be able to look into space and capture the image of a black hole is a tremendous feat of science and technology. Another interesting observation from this image is of the orientation of the black hole as it spins. As a result, the matter in the accretion disk of Sgr A* takes less time to go around. Second, at around 4 million times the mass of the sun, Sgr A* is a supermassive black hole but it is relatively tiny compared to the M87 black hole. The final image that we see is the combination of thousands of images produced from this data. In 2019, the same collaboration produced the first direct image of a black hole, at the centre of the M87 galaxy, which is 55 million light years away from us.

It's only the second time scientists have managed to capture a black hole on camera.

MIT Haystack Observatory astronomer Vincent Fish said the researchers hope to obtain M87 black hole video in the future. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy that contains at least 100 billion stars. The black hole - called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* - is the second one ever to be imaged. Sagittarius A*, despite being much closer to our solar system than M87, was harder to image. This is called the black hole's shadow or silhouette. Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects with gravity so strong that not even light can escape, making viewing them extremely challenging.

Event Horizon telescope captures image giving a glimpse of the turbulent heart of our galaxy.

The EHT picks up radiation emitted by particles within the accretion disc that are heated to billions of degrees as they orbit the black hole before plunging into the central vortex. Some combination of these factors – and possibly some extreme black hole phenomenon – explain the bright blobs in the image. A minority of scientists had continued to speculate about the possibility of other exotic objects, such as boson stars or clumps of dark matter. Markoff compared the observations with trying to photograph a puppy chasing its tail using a camera with a slow shutter speed. The black hole itself, known as Sagittarius A*, cannot be seen because no light or matter can escape its gravitational grip. It’s been a 100-year search for these things and so, scientifically, it’s a huge deal.”

In another historic first, astronomers using the Event Horizon Telescope have taken the first image of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, ...

Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Kip Thorne ran calculations on a supercomputer to try to present a realistic vision of what a black hole might look like. "If I have a black hole that has a certain charge, electrical charge, like static electricity and a certain mass, and it's spinning a certain way, it is absolutely indistinguishable from any other black hole. It's thanks to that movie that we got our first real idea of what a black hole might look like. In the case of M87, its black hole is one of the most massive known. Regardless if we'd seen them or not, black holes have long captured the public's imagination. "I think the analogy to dinosaurs, it's not that different," said Pen, who is also a professor at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. "[It's] a little bit like seeing a live dinosaur in your neighbour's backyard: we can't actually touch it yet. "So solving that problem, we can play some games to remove the blurring. However, astronomer and physicist Karl Schwarzschild, who was fighting in the trenches on the German front during the First World War, managed to prove that they could indeed exist. With Sagittarius A*, while closer, it is along the galactic plane, which means the telescopes needed to peer through thick gas, dust and plasma. Creating imaging of the two black holes presented different challenges. Observations of stars near the core showed them orbiting something invisible, which suggested a black hole. The data for both M87 and Sagittarius A* were collected in 2017.

"For decades, astronomers have wondered what lies at the heart of our galaxy, pulling stars into tight orbits through its immense gravity," Michael Johnson, ...

"This image is a testament to what we can accomplish, when as a global research community, we bring our brightest minds together to make the seemingly impossible, possible," National Science Foundation Director Sethuraman Panchanathan said in a statement. Bouman and EHT member Antonio Fuentes, who will join Caltech as a postdoctoral researcher in October, are developing methods that will allow them to stitch images of the black hole together to reflect this motion. It is believed that black holes exist at the center of most galaxies, acting like an engine that powers them. Taking the Sagittarius A* image was like capturing a photo of a grain of salt in New York City using a camera in Los Angeles, according to California Institute of Technology researchers. This means the brightness and pattern of the gas around Sgr A* was changing rapidly as the EHT Collaboration was observing it -- a bit like trying to take a clear picture of a puppy quickly chasing its tail." If we could see this in our night sky, the black hole would appear to be the same size as a doughnut sitting on the moon.

On May 12th, astronomers with the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration unveiled an image of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way ...

That’s not the case for Sgr A*, which is a much more quiet kind of black hole. That provides a lot of interference that the scientists had to work around. After that, the data underwent an intense calibration process, as the scientists attempted to construct the best image they could make of the black hole’s silhouette and plasma. The resulting image is the one that was unveiled today, though it may look a bit blurry to the average observer. While it makes for an interesting light show, it changes the composition of the black hole every few hours, making it tricky to observe over time. It’s then up to the EHT scientists to piece together the data the telescopes gathered to create a single image. “That means as we were collecting data during the Earth’s rotation, the material was swirling around Sgr A* so quickly that Sgr A*’s appearance could change from minute to minute,” Bouman said. Instead, we can capture the silhouette of a black hole. This celestial present comes from the same project which made quite the splash back in 2019 when they released the very first image taken of a black hole. She added, “This image shows a bright ring surrounding the darkness — the telltale sign of the shadow of the black hole.” Truthfully, one cannot capture an image of a black hole directly. Today, scientists collaborating on the massive Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project released an image of Sagittarius A*, the gargantuan black hole spinning away at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

The feat goes a long way toward enhancing scientists' knowledge of the structure of black holes.

The bright ring that appears is the light escaping from the hot gas swirling around the black hole. The black hole in the M87 galaxy is 1,500 times more massive than Sgr A*, but 2,000 times further away. That ring is hot gas as it escapes the star.

Astronomers have captured the Milky Way's supermassive, mysterious abyss, 27000 light-years from Earth.

Astronomers still don’t know what transpires in the interior of a black hole, beyond that point of no return.“Black holes represent that fundamental breakdown in our understanding of how gravity works,” she said. But Sagittarius A* “creates enormous amounts of gravity in this region, so gas clouds that form stars should be ripped apart in this region.” Perhaps long ago, tens of millions of years in the past, the black hole was ringed by a swirling disk of gas that rotated so fast that pockets of it ignited into stars. “I love to talk about our galaxy, as opposed to the Milky Way,” she said. All the cosmic stuff between us and the galactic center can cause the light coming from the galactic center to appear distorted in the data. It would take decades of additional research to show that there’s no other explanation for the mysterious object at the Milky Way’s core. On top of that, although Sagittarius A* is only 27,000 light-years from Earth—and “only” is quite appropriate when you consider that the black hole in M87 is 55 million light-years from Earth—our supermassive black hole is harder to see. The new image is further proof that the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy is, well, exactly that. “We’re looking through everything that is between us and the center of the galaxy, whereas for M87, we’re looking out and away from the Milky Way,” Özel said. The first image, of the supermassive black hole at the center of the nearby galaxy Messier 87, or M87 for short, was released in 2019 with great fanfare. They had followed a similar process to reveal M87’s black hole, which was observed during the same run in 2017. Travel about the same distance in the other direction, past still more stars and planets and moons, through glittering clouds of dust, and you’ll end up in the heart of the galaxy, at one of the most mysterious landmarks in the universe. For the first time in human history, you don’t have to imagine it.

The Event Horizon Telescope has obtained the first image of the long-theorized supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.