Washington: The National Science Foundation in the US said on Thursday that astronomers have revealed the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
The National Science Foundation said the image was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope.
“Our own black hole! Astronomers have just revealed the 1st image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy using the (EHT), a planet-scale array of radio telescopes that emerged from decades of NSF support,” NSF tweeted.
“This is the first image of Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. It’s the first direct visual evidence of the presence of this black hole,” the Association said in a statement here.
“It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an array which links together eight existing radio observatories across the planet to form a single Earth-sized virtual telescope. The telescope is named after the “event horizon”, the boundary of the black hole, beyond which no light can escape,” it added.
“Although we cannot see the event horizon itself, because it cannot emit light, glowing gas orbiting around the black hole reveals a telltale signature: a dark central region, called a “shadow,” surrounded by a bright ring-like structure. The new view captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole, which is four million times more massive than our sun. The image of the Sgr A* black hole is an average of the different images that the EHT Collaboration has extracted from its 2017 observations,” said the statement.
NASA said in a tweet, “Congratulations to the EHT team on capturing the first image of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our galaxy!”
