- 3577 - MILKY WAY GALAXY - blackhole is pictured! One of the most important observations made in astronomy is the first image of the supermassive black hole at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way’s central black hole is an orange ring with clumps that are especially bright.
---------------- 3577- MILKY WAY GALAXY - blackhole is pictured!
- Obviously we can not see a Black hole because no light can escape its enormous gravity. Light photons are turned around at the Event Horizon at the edge of the black hole. But we can see this edge and the photons and matter that are orbiting the event horizon at nearly the speed of light.
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- While we have long suspected that supermassive black holes lurked at the center of galaxies, previous observations relied on indirect evidence. That all changed in 2019 when the ‘Event Horizon Telescope” captured an image of the startlingly huge black hole at the center of the galaxy M87.
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- It took eight telescopes several nights to gather that image in 2017, and a couple of years of processing on some of the most powerful computers on Earth to assemble it. But there was a much closer black hole they also worked on: Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the behemoth that commands the Milky Way.
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- This image is the first direct evidence of our central supermassive black hole by directly imaging its event horizon, the point of no return in a black hole, as well as the “ring of fire” around it. The material orbiting the event horizon is traveling nearly the speed of light.
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- Sgr A* is 4,000,000 times the mass of our Sun, and its dark region, the event horizon, from which light cannot escape, is about the size of Mercury’s orbit around our Sun. The incredible new picture explains the gravitational well that scientists had long suspected lurked at the center of our galaxy, previously hinted at by the peculiar behaviors of stars and gasses in the region.
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- The image involved the work of more than 300 researchers, billions of processing hours, 11 radio telescopes scattered across the globe, and several petabytes of data that, if printed, would require enough paper to stretch from Earth to the Moon.
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- The Event Horizon Telescope captured Sgr A* for a few days in April 2017 via radio wavelengths that were short enough to see the glow of the infalling and outfalling heated material swirling around the black hole’s center.
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- The EHT can see three million times sharper than the human eye. So when you are sitting in a Munich beer garden you could see the bubbles in a glass of beer in New York. That’s some magnification.
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- The Sgr A* image has been five years in the making. This project has an increasingly exciting future. The initial imaging campaign worked on imaging six objects, three of which the EHT collaboration have released: M87, Sgr A*, and a trail of matter near the galaxy Centaurus A, falling short of imaging the event horizon.
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- It will also add new telescope sites in the coming years, increasing the resolution of the black hole image, and much more magnification in astronomy.
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May 13, 2022 MILKY WAY GALAXY - blackhole is pictured! 3577
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