Astronomers Image the Massive Black Hole At The Center of Our Galaxy
With the help of supercomputers and computer algorithms, astronomers have captured the first image of the supermassive blackhole sitting at the center of our galaxy.
The image captures Sagittarius A*, which astronomers had long suspected was a black hole partly due to its massive size at over 4 million times the size of our Sun.
The snapshots released(Opens in a new window) on Thursday provide the first direct evidence that Sagittarius A* is, indeed, a black hole devouring the mass around it. The image itself shows the glowing ring of gas swirling around the black hole, which resides over 25,000 light years away.
The image comes from the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, a team of international astronomers. In 2019, the group captured(Opens in a new window) the famous image of the supermassive blackhole in the distant Messier 87 galaxy, which resides over 53 million light years away.
To image Sagittarius A*, the EHT team used a worldwide network of eight radio telescopes to grab smaller, incomplete snapshots of various parts of the blackhole. The results produced “3.5 petabytes of data,” or the equivalent of about 100 million TikTok videos.
Supercomputers were then used to process and analyze the data, allowing the EHT team to reconstruct the readings into complete composite images of the black hole. “It took several years to refine our image and confirm what we had, but we prevailed,” said astrophysicist Feryal Ozel in a press briefing(Opens in a new window).
The team also spent years developing computational algorithms capable of capturing data of Sagittarius A*, despite the fast rotation around the black hole, which causes the gas around it to complete an orbit each minute. The work led the EHT group to
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