The black hole, known as “Sagittarius A,” is four million times the mass of our Sun.
The ring itself is about 60 million kilometers long, that is, the length of Mercury’s orbit around our star.
The giant is very far from Earth – about 26,000 light years.
Our supermassive black hole
The international Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team collaborated behind the image.
In 2019, the same scientists captured another image of the black hole, which is located at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87, often called M87.
But this new image is special because it is our supermassive black hole, says Professor Hino Falk, one of the European researchers behind the EHT project.
The Milky Way’s black hole is more than a thousand times smaller than what was imaged in M87.
– This is in “our own backyard,” and if you want to understand black holes and how they work, that’s what you can learn from, because we see it in intricate detail, a German-Dutch researcher from Radboud University in Nijmegen told BBC News.
2019: This image shows the supermassive black hole of the M87 galaxy. Photo: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration / Abacapress.com
eight telescopes
300 researchers from 80 institutions worked with eight simultaneous telescopes around the world to capture the image.
The European Southern Observatory (ESO) states that the image provides valuable information about how these supermassive black holes, which are believed to be at the center of most galaxies, function.
The image was shown to the world for the first time at a news conference organized by the US National Science Foundation in Washington on Thursday.
“Explorer. Unapologetic entrepreneur. Alcohol fanatic. Certified writer. Wannabe tv evangelist. Twitter fanatic. Student. Web scholar. Travel buff.”
