![]() To image it, the team created the powerful EHT, which linked together eight existing radio observatories across the planet to form a single “Earth-sized” virtual telescope. ![]() The EHT team's results are being published today in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.īecause the black hole is about 27,000 light-years away from Earth, it appears to us to have about the same size in the sky as an orange on the Moon. But now we have comprehensive findings and this work opens a new chapter in our understanding of black holes.”ĭr Younsi, a UKRI Stephen Hawking Fellow at UCL who has recently been appointed to the EHT Science Council, helped run many of these simulations, and is the author of one of only two codes used to generate the entire library of nearly 2 million simulated images of Sgr A*.ĮHT Project Scientist Dr Geoffrey Bower, from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei and University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, US, said: “We were stunned by how well the size of the ring agreed with predictions from Einstein’sTheory of General Relativity. These unprecedented observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very centre of our galaxy.” It was especially challenging because of the haze of stars, dust, and gas in between Earth and the Galactic Centre, as well as the fact that the pattern of light from Sgr A* changed quickly, over the course of minutes. ![]() “Producing this image is the result of a monumental effort by hundreds of scientists over five years. It is key to our understanding of how the Milky Way formed and will evolve in the future. This black hole is the glue that holds the galaxy together. The new view captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole, which is four million times more massive than our Sun.ĭr Ziri Younsi (UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory), EHT Collaboration member and co-author on the research papers describing the new findings, said: “Our results are the strongest evidence to date that a black hole resides at the centre of our galaxy. This strongly suggested that this object – known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*, pronounced "sadge-ay-star”) – is a black hole, and today’s image provides the first direct visual evidence of it.Īlthough we cannot see the black hole itself, because it is completely dark, glowing gas around it reveals a tell-tale signature: a dark central region (called a “shadow”) surrounded by a bright ring-like structure. Scientists had previously seen stars orbiting around something invisible, compact, and very massive at the centre of the Milky Way. The image, produced by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, uses observations from a worldwide network of radio telescopes, and is a long-anticipated look at the massive object that sits at the very centre of our galaxy. The result provides overwhelming evidence that the object is indeed a black hole and yields valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the centre of most galaxies. The first image of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy has been produced by a global team involving UCL researcher Dr Ziri Younsi.
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