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Black hole in the Milky Way is photographed for the first time ever 

Sagittarius A* is about 27,000 light-years away from planet Earth in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way

May 13, 2022 5:12pm

Updated: May 13, 2022 5:13pm

Astronomers captured the first picture of the supermassive black hole in the Milky Way on Thursday, marking “the first direct image of the gentle giant in the center of our galaxy.”

The new image of “the gentle giant,” named Sagittarius A*, was released in six simultaneous news conferences around the world. It was captured by a team of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, in which 300 scientists from 80 institutions joined together to operate a network of eight satellites. 

"For decades, astronomers have wondered what lies at the heart of our galaxy, pulling stars into tight orbits through its immense gravity," Michael Johnson, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, said in a statement.

"With the (Event Horizon Telescope or EHT) image, we have zoomed in a thousand times closer than these orbits, where the gravity grows a million times stronger. At this close range, the black hole accelerates matter to close to the speed of light and bends the paths of photons in the warped (space-time)."

Sagittarius A* is about 27,000 light-years away from planet Earth in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. It is about four million times larger than our sun. It took astronomers five years to capture its image and confirm its discovery. 

“I met this black hole 20 years ago and have loved it and tried to understand it since,” Dr. Feryal Özel said. “But until now, we didn’t have the direct picture.”

In 2019, the same team the first-ever image taken of a black hole in galaxy Messier 87, or M87, located 55 million light-years away. Its mass is about 6.5 billion times larger than our sun.

“We have seen what we thought was ‘unseeable,’” said astronomer Sheperd Doeleman at the time. "We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole.

While the two supermassive black holes appear to be similar, the EHT team claims they are two completely different objects. 

"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," said Sera Markoff, cochair of the EHT Science Council and a professor of theoretical astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam, in a statement.

"This tells us that (Einstein's theory of) General Relativity governs these objects up close, and any differences we see further away must be due to differences in the material that surrounds the black holes."

Scientists claim that this groundbreaking discovery could help them better understand outer space, gravity, the Milky Way, and the nature of black holes.