![]() “ For me the image of Sgr A* is even more exciting than our first black hole image of M87,” said Professor Kramer.“ For Sgr A*, we already knew the mass and distance of the black hole from other measurements. The EHT team's results are being published today in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The new view captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole, which is four million times more massive than our Sun. Left to right: Professors Michael Kramer, Luciano Rezzolla and Heino Falcke at the Effelsberg Radio Telescope.Īlthough we cannot see the event horizon of the black hole because it is completely dark, hot and glowing gas around it reveals a telltale signature: a dark central region, called a “shadow”, surrounded by a bright ring-like structure. The project, proposed in 2013 and supported with an ERC Synergy Grant from 2014 to 2020, aimed not only to produce the first-ever image of a black hole, but also “turn our Galactic Centre into a fundamental-physics laboratory to measure the fabric of space and time with unprecedented precision.’ Now these objectives have been fully accomplished. ![]() Professor Falcke together with Professors Michael Kramer from the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy, and Luciano Rezzolla from Goethe University Frankfurt, and their teams of postdocs and PhD students and research staff, led BlackHoleCam. This is a lifelong dream come true,’ said Heino Falcke Professor of Astroparticle Physics and Radio Astronomy at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands. Now we can finally see that it is really there. ‘ The idea that our own Milky Way may harbour a supermassive black hole always intrigued and motivated me. This shows beyond reasonable doubt that this object known as Sagittarius A* is a black hole, and today’s image provides the first direct visual evidence of it. Scientists had previously seen stars orbiting around something invisible, ultra-compact, and very massive at the centre of the Milky Way. The new image is a long-anticipated look at the massive object that sits at the very centre of our own galaxy. The breakthrough follows the EHT collaboration’s 2019 release of the first image of a black hole, called M87*, at the centre of the more distant Messier 87 galaxy. The image, in unprecedented resolution, was produced by Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global scientific collaboration, where scientists funded by the European Research Council, through BlackHoleCam project, have played a key role. This result adds overwhelming evidence - over length scales comparable with the event horizon - that the object was indeed a black hole and yielded valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the centre of most galaxies. Astronomers have unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy.
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