In a pioneering scientific endeavor, Sagittarius A*, has been visualized for the very first time.
This remarkable feat was accomplished through the collaboration and coordination of an array of telescopes worldwide, managed by the Event Horizon Telescope network. It's their second such image after releasing in 2019 a picture of the giant black hole at the heart of another galaxy called Messier 87, or M87. That object was more than a thousand times bigger at 6.5 billion times the mass of our Sun.
"But this new image is special because it's our supermassive black hole," Prof Heino Falcke, one of the European pioneers behind the EHT project, told the BBC.
"This is in 'our backyard', and if you want to understand black holes and how they work, this is the one that will tell you because we see it in intricate detail," the German-Dutch scientist from Radboud University Nijmegen told BBC News.
Noting that the angular resolution of conventional telescopes are too small to capture such an image, scientists harmonized their efforts, stitching millions of gigabytes of data to construct this image. The EHT's used a revolutionary technique called very long baseline array interferometry (VLBI), combining a network of eight widely spaced radio antennas to mimic a telescope the size of our planet.
This arrangement enables the EHT to observe microarcseconds of the sky, hailing similar sharpness to that of being able to see a bagel on the surface of the moon.
"Because Sagittarius A* is a much smaller black hole - it's around a thousand times smaller - its ring structure changes on timescales that are a thousand times faster," explained team member Dr Ziri Younsi from University College London, UK. "It's very dynamic. The 'hotspots' you see in the ring move around from day to day."
The figure unveils the accretion disk surrounding Sagittarius A*, an area of intense heat and energetic material.
The EHT network's achievement is published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
It signifies a true victory for human prowess - underscoring the culmination of international cooperation in advancing scientific knowledge.
Source: Amos, Jonathan. BBC. "Black hole: First picture of Milky Way monster". https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61412463. 12/05/2022. [Date accessed: 12/05/2022]
Edited by: Manan Chordia.
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