This is the first image of the massive black hole living at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*.

The mass of the hole is 4 million times that of our Sun.

In the image, a central dark region where the hole is located is surrounded by light from super-hot gas accelerated by enormous gravitational forces.

This ring is approx. 60 million kilometersAbout the size of Mercury’s orbit around the Sun.

The supermassive monster is about 26,000 light-years away, so it poses no danger to Earth.

The image was produced by the international team. Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).

In 2019, EHT released an image of the giant black hole at the heart of another galaxy called Messier 87 or M87.

This object is more than a thousand times larger, with 6.5 billion times the mass of our Sun.

“But this new image is special because it is our black hole. supermassiveProfessor Heino Falcke, one of the researchers of the EHT project, said.

“This is in our backyard, and if you want to understand black holes and how they work, here’s the answer, because we see it in intricate detail,” Falcke of Radboud University in Nijmegen told the BBC.

What is a black hole?

• A black hole is a region of space where matter collapses on itself.
• Gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape.
• Black holes arise from the explosive disappearance of some massive stars.
• Some are really huge and have billions of times the mass of our Sun.
• It is not known how these monsters in the centers of galaxies came to be.
• But it is clear that they energize the galaxy and influence its evolution.

EHT Number

Achieving this image meant a great success.

At 26,000 light-years from Earth, Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short, is a small go crazy in the sky. Detecting such a target requires incredible resolution.

The trick to EHT is a technique called very long fundamental sequence interferometry (VLBI).

Essentially, this technique combines a network of eight widely spaced radio antennas to mimic a telescope the size of our planet.

This arrangement allows the EHT to intercept a measured angle in the sky. arc second. Members of the EHT team cite visual acuity similar to being able to see a donut on the Moon’s surface.

Also, it takes atomic clocks, smart algorithms, and countless hours of supercomputing to create a picture from a few petabytes (1 petabyte equals one million gigabytes) of data collected.

The way a black hole warps light—through lensing—means that only a ‘shadow’ can be seen, but the glow of matter around this darkness spreads out into a circle known as an accretion disk. reveals where the object is.

This image looks like the hole in M87, but important differences.

“Since Sagittarius A* is about 1,000 times smaller, the ring structure changes on time scales 1,000 times faster,” said team member Dr Ziri Younsi from University College London, UK.

“It’s very dynamic. The ‘hot spots’ you see in the ring are moving day by day.”

The superheated excited gas or plasma in the ring travels around the black hole at a significant fraction of the speed of light (300,000 km/s).

The brightest areas are probably places. where the material moves towards us and where the light emission is energized.

These rapid changes in the Sgr A* neighborhood are part of the reason why it takes much longer to produce an image compared to M87.

No doubt

Interpreting the data has been a more difficult challenge.

The telescope’s observations for both black holes were actually obtained during the same period, early 2017, but at its largest size and 55 million light-years away, M87 looks static when compared to Sgr A*.

The scientists began applying the measurements in the new image to test the physics we currently use. to identify black holes.

What you’ve seen so far is fully consistent with Einstein’s theory of gravity, the equations he established in his general theory of relativity.

For decades, a supermassive black hole was suspected to exist. center of the galaxy.

What else could produce gravitational forces that accelerate nearby stars in space at speeds of up to 24,000 km/s?

Interestingly, when the Nobel Prize committee honored astronomers Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez with the physics prize in 2020 for their work on Sgr A*, it was simply a “supermassive compact object”.

In this case it was a wiggle room another exotic phenomenon It would be an explanation.

But now there is no doubt.

In August, the new James Webb Super Space Telescope will set its sights on Sgr A*.

It won’t have the resolution to directly image the black hole and the accretion ring, but it will allow the study of the black hole’s surroundings with its incredibly sensitive infrared instruments.

Astronomers will study the behavior and physics of hundreds of stars orbiting the black hole in unprecedented detail.

Even if there are any stellar-sized black holes in the region, and invisible or dark matter.

“Every time we have a new tool that can take a clearer picture of the universe, we do everything we can to train it in the galactic center, and we inevitably learn something great,” said Jessica Lu, a professor at the University of California. Berkeley, USA. UU. will lead the Webb campaign.