A NEW picture has given the world its very first look at the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy.
Astronomers 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.
What is inside a black hole?
Light gets chaotically bent and twisted around by gravity as it gets sucked into the abyss along with superheated gas and dust.
A black hole is unseeable, so photographing one is kind of a paradox. How did astronomers do it? The image you’re seeing is actually of the black hole’s shadow—a dark circle set against glowing, writhing matter around it. 📽️ https://t.co/VIgYekKlcS pic.twitter.com/eyYd4GtkPc
— Scientific American (@sciam) May 12, 2022
The colourised image unveiled on Thursday is from the international consortium behind the Event Horizon Telescope, a collection of eight synchronised radio telescopes around the world.
Previous efforts had found the black hole in the centre of our galaxy too jumpy to get a good picture.
First image of a black hole
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 Milky Way black hole is called Sagittarius A*, near the border of Sagittarius and Scorpius constellations. It is four million times more massive than our sun.
This is not the first black hole image. The same group released the first one in 2019 and it was from a galaxy 53 million light-years away.
The Milky Way black hole is much closer, about 27,000 light-years away. A light year is 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometres).
The project cost nearly 60 million US dollars with 28 million dollars coming from the US National Science Foundation.
