Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters] – A beast resides at the heart of spiral-shaped Milky Way galaxies. The supermassive Black Hole is 4,000,000 times larger than the sun. And it consumes any matter, including dust and gas.

Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a worldwide network of observatories that collectively observe radio sources associated to black holes. It has been being used by scientists around the world to study the Milky Way. A Thursday announcement was made to signal they may have finally captured an image. The black hole is called Sagittarius A*, or SgrA*.

The researchers involved in this international collaboration have declined to disclose the nature of their announcement ahead of scheduled news conferences but issued a news release calling it a “groundbreaking result on the center of our galaxy.”

In 2019, the EHT team unveiled the first-ever photo https://eventhorizontelescope.org/press-release-april-10-2019-astronomers-capture-first-image-black-hole of a black hole. It showed the Messier 87 supermassive dark hole, also known as M87.

The researchers also have focused their work on Sagittarius A*, located about 26,000 light-years – the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km) – from Earth.

“One of the objects that we hope to observe with the Event Horizon Telescope… is our own black hole in our own backyard,” Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astrophysicist Sheperd Doeleman, the former EHT project director, said during a July 2021 scientific presentation.

Black holes are dense, extremely dense objects. They have such strong gravity that light cannot escape.

There are several types of black hole. Starlight-mass black hole are smaller than the ones that formed when massive individual stars collided at the end of their lifetime cycles. Also, there are intermediate-mass dark holes that have a higher mass. The supermassive dark holes, which are found in the centers of many galaxies, also exist. They are believed to have formed relatively quickly after the formation of their galaxies.

EHT began in 2012 with the aim of directly observing the black hole’s immediate environment. Black holes’ event horizon are the points beyond which all other objects, including stars, planets or gas, will be lost.

Black holes are difficult to view because they do not allow light escape. Project scientists searched the area for a “ring of lights” – superheated, disrupted material and radiation moving at a tremendous rate at the edge the event horizon. It was a region that represents the true black hole. This is the “black hole’s silhouette” or shadow.

Known as a spiral galaxy, the Milky Way viewed from above or below resembles a spinning pinwheel, with our sun situated on one of the spiral arms and Sagittarius A* located at the center. There are at least 100 million stars in this galaxy.

The M87 black hole is far more distant and massive than Sagittarius A*, situated about 54 million light-years from Earth with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun. Researchers revealed that they had taken a photo of the M87 black hole. They claimed that it showed Albert Einstein’s prediction that the shadow would almost be a perfect circle.

Thursday’s announcement is made simultaneously at news conferences across the United States, Japan, China, Mexico and Chile. Huib Jan van Langevelde (Norwegian radio astronomer) is currently EHT’s project director.

Doeleman highlighted the supermassive size of black holes.

Doeleman explained that “there are great things out there, but we’re small.” But that can also be a source of inspiration in certain ways. The universe has a lot of things to offer.