The EHT observed Sgr A* on multiple nights, collecting data for many hours in a row, similar to using a long exposure time on a camera.Īnd just like a high-powered camera, imaging Sgr A* required the support of the most sensitive instruments in radio astronomy.
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. “These unprecedented observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very center of our galaxy, and offer new insights on how these giant black holes interact with their surroundings.” The EHT team’s results are being published today in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.īecause the black hole is about 27,000 light-years away from Earth, it appears to us to have about the same size in the sky as a donut on the Moon. “We were stunned by how well the size of the ring agreed with predictions from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity,” said EHT Project Scientist Geoffrey Bower from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei. The new view captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole, which is four million times more massive than our Sun. This strongly suggested that this object - known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*, pronounced “sadge-ay-star”) - is a black hole, and today’s image provides the first direct visual evidence of it.Īlthough we cannot see the black hole itself, because it is completely dark, glowing gas around it reveals a telltale signature: a dark central region (called a “shadow”) surrounded by a bright ring-like structure.
Scientists had previously seen stars orbiting around something invisible, compact, and very massive at the center of the Milky Way. The image is a long-anticipated look at the massive object that sits at the very center of our galaxy. The image was produced by a global research team called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, using observations from a worldwide network of radio telescopes. This result provides overwhelming evidence that the object is indeed a black hole and yields valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the center of most galaxies. The AP is solely responsible for all content.At simultaneous press conferences around the world, including at a National Science Foundation-sponsored press conference at the US National Press Club in Washington, D.C., astronomers have unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. Things are calm out here.”įollow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. “We live out in the suburbs (in a spiral arm of the galaxy). Things move fast,” Ghez said in an interview. It’s “like an urban downtown, everything is more extreme. National Science Foundation.Įven though it is quieter than expected, the center of the Milky Way is an important place to study, Ghez said. The project cost nearly $60 million with $28 million coming from the U.S.
#BLACK HOLE IMAGE MOVIE#
The next step is a movie of one of those two black holes, maybe both, Fish said. To get the picture, the eight telescopes had to coordinate so closely “in a process similar to everyone shaking hands with everyone else in the room,” said astronomer Vincent Fish of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Īstronomers worked with data collected in 2017 to get the new images.
0 kommentar(er)
