Astronomers released the first photograph of a supermassive black hole roiling at the heart of the Milky Way on Thursday. Its gravity is so strong that it bends space and time, forming a brilliant light ring with endless darkness at its center.
The black hole, which people can observe from Earth near Sagittarius, has a mass of more than 4 million suns. The latest image reveals three bright spots along a ring that tilts face-on toward the Earth, surprising the scientists.
According to the scientists, compared to other supermassive black holes, the one at the center of our Milky Way is comparatively placid - as quiet as something that devours stars and reaches temperatures estimated at billions of degrees can be.
Researchers published the study, "Focus on First Sgr A* Results from the Event Horizon Telescope," in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
As the Event Horizon Telescope collected data for its remarkable new image of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, a legion of other telescopes including three NASA X-ray observatories in space was also watching.
Image of the Supermassive Black Hole at Milky Way Center Seen
The image depicted a lumpy doughnut of radio emission framing empty space, which experts showed at six simultaneous press conferences in Washington and worldwide. When Feryal Özel of the University of Arizona exhibited what she termed "the first direct photograph of the gentle giant at the heart of our galaxy" before the National Press Club in Washington, oohs and aahs erupted. It appears that black holes are like doughnuts, she continued.
Dr. Özel is a member of the Event Horizon Telescope project, which brings together more than 300 scientists from 13 universities to manage an ever-expanding worldwide network of telescopes that combine to form one massive telescope the size of Earth.
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"I met this black hole 20 years ago and have loved it and tried to understand it since," Dr. Özel said in a New York Times report. "But until now, we didn't have the direct picture."
The same team photographed a black hole in the galaxy Messier 87, or M87, in 2019. The first photograph of a black hole is now on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At the moment, Sheperd Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, remarked, "We have seen what we believed was 'unseeable.'"
About Sagittarius A*
The black hole in the core of the Milky Way is named Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), pronounced "sadge-ay-star," The Washington Post reported. It's over a thousand times smaller than Messier 87's black hole. However, in terms of cosmic proximity, Sgr A* is the one nearest to home.
The new finding will help astronomers better understand gravity, galaxy development, and how even seemingly peaceful clouds of stars, such as the grand pinwheel of stars and Milky Way, can spawn quasars, massive energy geysers seen across the cosmos.
The discovery also confirms a 1971 publication by Cambridge University's Martin Rees and his colleague Donald Lynden-Bell, who died in 2018, that suggested quasars were powered by supermassive black holes. Dr. Rees described the new discovery as "a logistical triumph (and I enjoyed the computer models)" in an email.
The resemblance of the current image to the one from 2019 proved, according to Dr. Özel, that the earlier image was not a coincidence. In an interview, Peter Galison, a physicist and historian at Harvard and a member of the group, stated that the M87 black hole was 1,500 times more massive than the Milky Way's; in physics or astronomy, anything that rises by a factor of 10 or more affects everything.
Black Hole in Milky Way Supports Albert Einstein's Theory of Gravity
The first-ever image of Milky Way's black hole supports Alber Einstein's theory of general relativity. Einstein predicted how matter would behave around black holes and it was spot on when they discovered Sagittarius A*.
Duncan Brown, a physics professor at Syracuse University, who was not involved in the cosmic photo op, said in a press release the recent picture of the black hole proved that Einstein was right again. He noted that the gas around the black hole was moving as fast as the speed of light, Insider reported.
Aside from Brown, more experts were stunned at how Einstein had it right, leaving other scientists trying to crack his theory disappointed.
"We were stunned by how well the ring size agreed with predictions from Einstein's theory of general relativity," Geoffrey Bower, an EHT collaborator and astronomer at Academia Sinica, in Taipei, said in a statement.
"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."
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