First Ever Image Of The Black Hole At The Heart Of Milky Way Galaxy
Scientists shared the very first image of gargantuan black hole that lives at the center of our galaxy.
The image was shared on 12th May 2022 by 'Event Horizon Telescope' (EHT) Collaboration - an international working group of astronomers who have networked a series of arrays of telescopes across the plane
Known as Sagittarius A*, the object is a staggering four million times the mass of our Sun.
What you see is a central dark region where the hole resides, circled by the light coming from super-heated gas accelerated by immense gravitational forces.
For scale, the ring is roughly the size of Mercury's orbit around our star. That's about 60 million km, or 40 million miles, across.
Fortunately, this is a long, long way away - some 26,000 light-years in the distance - so there's no possibility of us coming to any danger.
This is the second black hole of the galactic centre that the EHT group has taken. The first one was in 2019.
It was the image of M87* black hole, at the centre of another galaxy Messier 87 galaxy which is about 55 million light years away from us
"But this new image is special because it's our supermassive black hole," said Prof Heino Falcke, one of the European pioneers behind the EHT project.