Staff Editor
For the first time ever, astronomers got an actual snapshot image of the supermassive black hole lurking in the core of our very own Milky Way galaxy. They knew Sagittarius A had to be there but this is the first “direct observation confirming the presence of the black hole.”
A historic image
Every galaxy in our particular universe has a black hole at the center, for fuel and stability. The problem for astronomers has always been trying to catch an image of something that’s not actually there.
Singularities exist outside our universe. The gravity is so strong that they suck light right down the well. That means black holes don’t emit light.
What we can see and capture in an image is the “shadow of the black hole surrounded by a bright ring, which is light bent by the gravity of the black hole.”
The one here in our back yard weighs in at “4 million times more massive than our sun.” That’s what it takes to create a whirlpool of gravity in space-time for all the rest of the galaxy’s matter to use as a structural framework.
The work of intense gravity is obvious as it pulls stars into tight orbits, astrophysicist Michael Johnson explains. He likes to hang out at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
“With the Event Horizon Telescope image, we have zoomed in a thousand times closer than these orbits, where the gravity grows a million times stronger.” That’s important because “at this close range, the black hole accelerates matter to close to the speed of light and bends the paths of photons in the warped space-time.” Getting a snapshot is like a banking billiard shot.
Closer than we knew
It also turns out that Earth happens to be “2,000 light years closer to the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy than we thought.”
The process of gathering the new image revealed Sagittarius A is about 27,000 light-years from here. The project team was thrilled with the results.
“We were stunned by how well the size of the ring agreed with predictions from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity,” brags EHT project scientist Geoffrey Bower. The image made their day.
“These unprecedented observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very (center) of our galaxy, and offer new insights on how these giant black holes interact with their surroundings.”
If those of you who lived through the 70’s thought waiting for your vacation snaps to come back from Fotomat was bad, that’s nothing to these guys.
“It has taken five years for astronomers to capture and confirm this image and discovery.” up until now the best they could do was observe “stars orbiting some invisible, massive object at the galactic center.“
