Photographing a subject that doesn't even let light out is not an easy task. Eight
What happened?
Scientists have shown for the first time a photograph of the black hole that is located at the center of our galaxy. An international team of scientists presented their groundbreaking discovery live on May 12, 2022.
Astronomers worked with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) to image Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
How was a black hole photographed for the first time?
In 2019, the EHT telescope made the first everhumanity's images of heated dust and gas that surround the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, it is located at a distance of 55 million light-years from us.
According to Frans Cordova, director of the US National Science Foundation, the image of the black hole from M87 is the most important work of modern scientists.
Photo of a black hole in the galaxy M87
But at the top of the EHT to-do list todaya black hole lurking at the center of our own galaxy. Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short, is 27,000 light-years away and is light, only 4 million times the mass of the Sun.
But several questions remain whether scientists will be able to show the event horizon of this black hole. If so, will it look like the picture in the M87.
Why do we need a photo of a black hole?
Learning more about the characteristics and appearance of the nearest black hole could help scientists understand the evolution of our galaxy, says Joss Bland-Hawthorne, an astrophysicist at the University of Sydney.
But we can't just observe black holes.At their center, gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape. To take a picture of a black hole, the EHT uses light emitted by hot gas orbiting near the edge of the black hole's disk.
What do we know about the nearest black hole?
At the center of most galaxies is a supermassive black hole with a mass more than a million times that of our sun.
Astronomers have suspected for decades that ourthe galaxy also has its own black hole, but it was difficult to prove this. Those suspicions vanished when two different teams of scientists from the US and Germany investigated the exact movement of stars around the center of our galaxy in the 1990s.
Scientists have been tracking these stars for about 20 years andrealized that they were moving under the influence of a very, very massive, dense, dark clot. Further reduced this area of study to a modern small, as a result they came to the conclusion that it could only be a black hole or something that behaves like a black hole. Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel, who led the teams, received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.
But until now, scientists' knowledge of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way has been limited to the knowledge that its enormous gravitational pull greatly affects any objects passing by.
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