The team worked for five years, using supercomputers to combine and analyse their data, all the while compiling an unprecedented library of simulated black holes to compare with the observations.Īlso read: Space is not silent.Zoom in for our first look at the black hole at the center of our Milky Way, courtesy of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration.Īt the heart of our Milky Way galaxy lurks a supermassive black hole more than four million times the mass of our Sun. The effort was a partnership of more than 300 researchers from 80 institutes around the world that together make up the EHT Collaboration. The image of the Sgr A* black hole is an average of the different images the team extracted, finally revealing the giant lurking at the centre of our galaxy for the first time. While M87* was an easier, steadier target, with nearly all images looking the same, that was not the case for Sgr A*.

The researchers had to develop sophisticated new tools that accounted for the gas movement around Sgr A*. “This means the brightness and pattern of the gas around Sgr A* were 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,” Chan explained.

But where gas takes days to weeks to orbit the larger M87*, in the much smaller Sgr A*, it completes an orbit in mere minutes.” “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.Īlso read: The science behind how teeth helped identify skeletons in Punjab as sepoys killed in 1857Īccording to scientists, this achievement was considerably more difficult than imaging M87*, even though Sgr A* is much closer to us.ĮHT scientist Chi-kwan (‘CK’) Chan, from Steward Observatory and Department of Astronomy and the Data Science Institute of the University of Arizona, said: “The gas in the vicinity of the black holes moves at the same speed - nearly as fast as light - around both Sgr A* and M87*. “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 EHT Science Council and a professor of theoretical astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. The Sgr A* is more than a thousand times smaller and less massive than M87*. In 2019, the collaboration had released the first image of the black hole M87*, at the centre of the more distant Messier 87 galaxy. This is not the first black hole to be imaged by ETH. The EHT observed Sgr A* on multiple nights in 2017, 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 EHT, which linked together eight existing radio observatories across the planet to form a single “Earth-sized” virtual telescope. The black hole is about 27,000 light-years away from Earth. “These unprecedented observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very centre of our galaxy, and offer new insights on how these giant black holes interact with their surroundings,” Bower said. “We were stunned by how well the size of the ring agreed with predictions from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity,” EHT Project Scientist Geoffrey Bower from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei said in a statement. The new view captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole, which is four million times more massive than our Sun.

Very first image of a black hole