A light year is 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers). The Milky Way black hole is much closer, about 27,000 light years away.

It was from a galaxy 53 million light years away and is called M87* because it is in the Messier 87 galaxy. The group used the same process when it released the first image of a black hole in 2019. The EHT gazed at Sgr A* across multiple nights for many hours in a row, similar to long-exposure photography. These included the Institute for Millimetre Radio Astronomy (IRAM) 30-metre (98.4-foot) telescope in Spain, the most sensitive single antenna in the EHT network.

Though the presence of a black hole was thought to be the only plausible explanation, the new image provides the first direct visual proof.īecause it is 27,000 light years from Earth, it appears the same size in the sky as a doughnut on the Moon.Ĭapturing images of such a faraway object required linking eight giant radio observatories across the planet to form a single “Earth-sized” virtual telescope called the EHT. In the 1990s, astronomers mapped the orbits of the brightest stars near the centre of the Milky Way, confirming the presence of a supermassive compact object there, work that led to the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics. Its existence has been assumed since 1974, with the detection of an unusual radio source at the centre of the galaxy. Sagittarius A*, abbreviated to Sgr A*, which is pronounced “sadge-ay-star”, owed its name to its detection in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. The University of Arizona’s Feryal Ozel called the black hole “the gentle giant in the centre of our galaxy” while announcing the new image. The results are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “These unprecedented observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very centre of our galaxy,” said EHT project scientist Geoffrey Bower, of Taiwan’s Academia Sinica.īower also said in a statement provided by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) that the observations had offered “new insights on how these giant black holes interact with their surroundings”. The image depicts not the black hole itself, because that is completely dark, but the glowing gas that encircles the phenomenon, which is four million times more massive than the Sun, in a bright ring of bending light. The image, produced by a global team of scientists known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, is the first, direct visual confirmation of the presence of this invisible object, and comes three years after the very first image of a black hole from a distant galaxy. Light gets chaotically bent and twisted around by gravity as it gets sucked into the abyss along with superheated gas and dust. An international team of astronomers on Thursday unveiled the first image of a supermassive black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy, a cosmic body known as Sagittarius A*.Īstronomers believe nearly all galaxies, including our own, have these giant black holes at their centre, where light and matter cannot escape, making it extremely hard to get images of them.

Black hole in space