A light year is 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers). The Milky Way black hole is much closer, about 27,000 light-years away. The picture was from a galaxy 53 million light-years away that is 1,500 times bigger than the one in our galaxy. The same telescope group released the first black hole image in 2019. It is incredibly hot, trillions of degrees, Ozel said. Bower said it is probably more typical of what’s at the center of most galaxies, “just sitting there doing very little.” It's near the border of Sagittarius and Scorpius constellations and is 4 million times more massive than our sun. The Milky Way black hole is called Sagittarius A (with an asterisk denoting star).
It is about the size of the orbit of Mercury around our sun.īecause the black hole “is on a starvation diet” so little material is falling into the center, and that allows astronomers to gaze deeper, Bower said. The picture also confirms Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity: The black hole is precisely the size that Einstein's equations dictate. She described it as a “gentle giant” while announcing the breakthrough along with other astronomers involved in the project. "It burbled and gurgled as we looked at it," the University of Arizona's Feryal Ozel said. Getting a good image was a challenge previous efforts found the black hole too jumpy. The colorized image unveiled Thursday is from an international consortium behind the Event Horizon Telescope, a collection of eight synchronized radio telescopes around the world. Light gets bent and twisted around by gravity as it gets sucked into the abyss along with superheated gas and dust. WASHINGTON - The world's first image of the chaotic supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy doesn't portray a voracious cosmic destroyer but what astronomers Thursday called a “gentle giant" on a near-starvation diet.Īstronomers believe nearly all galaxies, including our own, have these giant black holes at their bustling and crowded center, where light and matter cannot escape, making it extremely hard to get images of them.
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