While the two images look similar, Sagittarius A* is more than 1,000 times smaller than M87*. European Southern Observatory/EHT Collaboration On the left is M87*, and the right is Sagittarius A*. These panels show the first two black hole images. It’s the second image ever captured of a black hole, with the first being the EHT’s achievement of imaging M87* at the heart of the distant Messier 87 galaxy, located 55 million light-years away, in 2019. This global telescope network essentially forms a single “Earth-size” virtual telescope when all eight are linked and observing in tandem. The telescope is named after the “event horizon,” the point at which no light can escape from a black hole. The discovery was made possible by more than 300 researchers from 80 institutions working with a network of eight different radio telescopes around the globe that make up the Event Horizon Telescope. “This image confirms decades of theoretical work to understand how black holes eat.” “We now see that the black hole is swallowing the nearby gas and light, pulling them into a bottomless pit,” Ramesh Narayan, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, said in a statement. Nobel Prize in Physics awarded for black hole discoveries that revealed the 'darkest secrets of the universe' From left: Roger Penrose, Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel. This year's Nobel Prize in Physics winners. The 2020 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to scientists Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for their discoveries about black holes, including evidence shared by Ghez and Genzel about the mass of the object at the center of the Milky Way. Previously, scientists observed stars orbiting some invisible, massive object at the galactic center. It has taken five years for astronomers to capture and confirm this image and discovery. The results of this groundbreaking discovery were published Thursday in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “These unprecedented observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very (center) of our galaxy, and offer new insights on how these giant black holes interact with their surroundings.” “We were stunned by how well the size of the ring agreed with predictions from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity,” said EHT project scientist Geoffrey Bower from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, in a statement. 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).” “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. “For decades, astronomers have wondered what lies at the heart of our galaxy, pulling stars into tight orbits through its immense gravity,” Michael Johnson, astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, said in a statement. Astronomers said the black hole is 4 million times more massive than our sun. It’s the first direct observation confirming the presence of the black hole, known as Sagittarius A*, as the beating heart of the Milky Way.īlack holes don’t emit light, but the image shows the shadow of the black hole surrounded by a bright ring, which is light bent by the gravity of the black hole. For the first time, astronomers have captured an image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

Black hole names