The Milky Way’s Black Hole Comes to Light (original) (raw)

Science|The Milky Way’s Black Hole Comes to Light

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/12/science/black-hole-photo.html

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Out There

The Event Horizon Telescope has once again caught sight of the “unseeable.”

The first direct image of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.Credit...Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration/National Science Foundation

Published May 12, 2022Updated May 13, 2022

Astronomers announced on Thursday that they had pierced the veil of darkness and dust at the center of our Milky Way galaxy to capture the first picture of “the gentle giant” dwelling there: a supermassive black hole, a trapdoor in space-time through which the equivalent of four million suns have been dispatched to eternity, leaving behind only their gravity and violently bent space-time.

The image, released in six simultaneous news conferences in Washington and around the globe, showed a lumpy doughnut of radio emission framing empty space. Oohs and aahs broke out at the National Press Club in Washington when Feryal Özel of the University of Arizona displayed what she called “the first direct image of the gentle giant in the center of our galaxy.” She added: “It seems that black holes like doughnuts.”

Dr. Özel is part of the Event Horizon Telescope project, a collaboration of more than 300 scientists from 13 institutions that operates an ever-growing global network of telescopes that compose one large telescope as big as Earth. The team’s results were published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“I met this black hole 20 years ago and have loved it and tried to understand it since,” Dr. Özel said. “But until now, we didn’t have the direct picture.”

In 2019, the same team captured an image of the black hole in the galaxy Messier 87, or M87. That image, the first ever taken of a black hole, is now enshrined in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “We have seen what we thought was ‘unseeable,’” Sheperd Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said at the time.

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