Science

Image of massive black hole at centre of our galaxy revealed for first time

Sagittarius A* possesses four million times the mass of our Sun and is located about 26,000 light-years from Earth.

Radio astronomers have imaged the super massive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. It is only the second-ever direct image of a black hole, after the same team unveiled a historic picture of a more distant black hole in 2019.

The long-awaited results, presented today by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, show an image reminiscent of the earlier one, with a ring of radiation surrounding a darker disk of precisely the size that was predicted from indirect observations and from Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity.

“Today, right this moment, we have direct evidence that this object is a black hole,” said astrophysicist Sara Issaoun of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics at a press conference in Garching, Germany.

In the past, attempts have been made to capture a similar image but these failed as the black hole was found to be too ‘jumpy’.

According to astronomers, nearly all galaxies, including our own, have 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,” an AP report explained.

Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects with gravity so strong that not even light can escape, making viewing them quite challenging. A black hole’s event horizon is the point of no return beyond which anything – stars, planets, gas, dust and all forms of electromagnetic radiation – gets dragged into oblivion.

Sagittarius A(asterisk), near the border of Sagittarius and Scorpius constellations is four million times more massive than our sun.

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy that contains at least 100 billion stars. Viewed from above or below it resembles a spinning pinwheel, with our sun situated on one of the spiral arms and Sagittarius A* located at the centre.

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