By Seth Borestein
Associated Press
The inhabitants of planet Earth were able to see this Thursday for the first time an image (impressive despite being blurry) of the supermassive black hole of the Milky Way.
It is "the friendly giant at the center of our galaxy," explained Feryal Ozel, an astronomer on the team at the University of Arizona that managed to take the image of Sagittarius A* with the Event Horizon telescope.
Scientists believe that almost all galaxies, including our own, have gigantic black holes at their centers, but light cannot escape their gravitational pull, making it extremely difficult to capture images.
First image of Sagittarius A * captured by the Event Horizon.REUTERS
The light twists chaotically as it is sucked into the gravitational abyss along with gas and superheated matter.
Previous efforts to capture a good image had concluded that the black hole is too unstable to do so.
The image released Thursday comes from the international consortium behind the Event Horizon Telescope, a collection of eight synchronized radio telescopes around the world.
The black hole in the Milky Way is called Sagittarius A*, near the border of the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius.
It is 4 million times larger than our sun.
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This is not the first image of a black hole.
The same group published the first in 2019 and it was from a galaxy 53 million light years away.
The Milky Way's black hole is much closer, about 27,000 light-years away.
A light year is 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 billion km).
The project has cost almost 60 million dollars, of which 28 come from the National Science Foundation of the United States.
