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The images of Sagittarius A* along with previous images of the black hole M87* give scientists more data to study black holes. “By averaging these images together, we're able to emphasize the common features appearing in most of them, and here a bright ring clearly pops out,” said EHT’s Katie Bouman, of Caltech, who credits the power of computational imaging to help overcome those obstacles. Researchers at the EHT collected tens of thousands of images and analyzed them. The team was faced with other challenges, like observing the black hole through Earth’s atmosphere and the turbulent gas of our galaxy. Capturing the image was “a bit like trying to take a clear picture of a puppy quickly chasing its tail,” said EHT scientist Chi-kwan Chan from the University of Arizona. But the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way is quite different it’s much smaller, and the gas swirls around it far more rapidly.
![black hole milky way galaxy black hole milky way galaxy](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/11/19/science/14BLACKHOLE1/14BLACKHOLE1-videoSixteenByNineJumbo1600.jpg)
The supermassive black hole casts a shadow on this glowing, gobbled-up gas.ĮHT scientists used a similar technique to create t he first images of a black hole M87*’s event horizon, released in 2019.
![black hole milky way galaxy black hole milky way galaxy](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/71/94/43/719443dfbb6efec8973ed8b2291d3367.jpg)
As the superheated material swirls around the black hole, it glows and illuminates. Instead, they are images of the shadow of the black hole. Since black holes gobble up everything around them including light, these images aren’t what we might think of as traditional photographs. The data was so massive it would have taken years to transmit via the internet, so the team shipped hard drives to different locations around the world for analysis. The observations of the EHT telescope network generated 3.5 petabytes of data–the equivalent of 100 million TikTok videos–which were combined using a sophisticated computer algorithm. From Earth, “it’s like looking for a tennis ball on the moon,” says University of Central Florida cosmologist James Cooney, who is not affiliated with the recent announcement. Despite its name, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy is quite small in the night sky. The image gives greater insight into the mysteries of black holes and further confirms Einstein’s long-standing theory of relativity. “By correlating their signals and studying the resulting data, we can reconstruct images of the source. To do that, the team connected more than half a dozen telescopes around the globe using a technique called interferometry. “Our telescope has to be almost as big as the Earth,” said Vincent Fish, an astronomer at the MIT Haystack Observatory and EHT collaborator, at the event. The announcement represents the work of more that 300 researchers at 80 institutions, including the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, across the globe who turned a network of telescopes into a planet-sized observatory known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). “A better understanding of this black hole at the center of our galaxy will help us understand our cosmic origin story.” “We finally got a glimpse at our very own black hole,” says Angelo Ricarte, an EHT collaborator and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, in an interview. In a press conference today, astronomers unveiled the first image of this supermassive black hole -an orange and yellow donut with a dark center. But they have never seen what it is-until now. The existence of this supermassive blackhole called Sagittarius A* has been theorized for decades as astronomers observed nearby stars orbiting something invisible, compact and very massive at the center of the Milky Way. About 27,000 light-years away sits a massive astrophysical object, some four million times the mass of our sun, surrounded by swirling super-hot gasses.