Shadow of Milky Way’s giant black hole revealed by astronomers

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Astronomers today released the first ever image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy—or an image of its shadow at least.

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This image, of the object known as Sagittarius A* , thought impossible just a few years ago, was achieved through the combined efforts of eight radio observatories around the globe and more than 300 scientists worldwide. “Until now, we didn’t have the direct picture confirming that Sgr A* was indeed a black hole,” team member Feryal Özel of the University of Arizona told a press conference in Washington, D.C., today.

Although supermassive black holes have enormous masses—millions or billions of times that of the Sun—their intense gravity means that their outer edge, the event horizon, is tiny in galactic terms. Sgr A*, which has a mass of 4 million Suns, has an event horizon that is just 15 times the size of the Earth-Moon distance. Imaging something so small from 27,000 light-years away presents a huge challenge for astronomers.

VLBI had not been attempted before in millimeter waves so in the 2010s, the EHT team had to develop new observing and processing techniques and adapted a handful of dishes to see whether it could work. By 2017 the team was ready tousing eight observatories, from Hawaii to Spain and from Arizona to the South Pole. A key addition was the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, a group of 64 dishes that together act like an 84-meter-wide telescope.

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