A supermassive blackhole in the Milky Way has been captured for the first time in an incredible image.
Astronomers at the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) unveiled the image of the phenomena in our galaxy, allowing the world a first look at the cosmic wonder.
The black hole is located 27,000 light-years away from Earth and is called Sagittarius A* - pronounced "sadge-ay-star".
Unveiled on May 12, the blackhole shows a bright ring of light with a dark void in its centre.
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.
Light gets chaotically bent and twisted around by gravity as it gets sucked into the abyss along with superheated gas and dust.
Previous efforts had found the black hole in the centre of our galaxy too jumpy to get a good picture.
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. It was published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
EHT Project Scientist Geoffrey Bower from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei said: "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.”
The effort to capture the image involved 300 researchers from 80 institutes around the world and comes on the back of the EHT's 2019 image of the M87*, the first ever direct visual image of a black hole.
"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,” says Sera Markoff, Co-Chair of the EHT Science Council and a professor of theoretical astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
She added: “We have images for two black holes — one at the large end and one at the small end of supermassive black holes in the Universe — so we can go a lot further in testing how gravity behaves in these extreme environments than ever before.”
The image was harder to capture than the M87* black hole according to EHT scientist Chi-kwan Chan, So much so that researchers had to developed sophisticated new tools that accounted for the gas movement around Sgr A*.
He 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*. 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 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.”
The EHT say that they are currently expanding and with "significant technological upgrades", they aim to share even more impressive images of black holes.
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