6/11/2023 0 Comments M87 black hole“It’s essentially cloudy ionized gas that blurs the image.” “We're looking through the plane of our galaxy, and in the plane of our galaxy, there is some material called turbulent plasma,” Bower says. Dusty plasma in spaceĪ lot is standing between us and Sagittarius A* - some of which radio telescopes can’t easily see through. But it’s proven elusive for two reasons: 2. Most large galaxies have a black hole at their center, and the size of the black hole largely depends on the size of the galaxy itself.Īt the outset of the experiment, EHT astronomers hoped to capture an image of Sagittarius A*. “We'd very much like to see that same kind of image and demonstrate that that effect that we see in M87 is present in Sagittarius A*,” Bower says. Geoffrey Bower, a project scientist at the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, tells Inverse that while Sagittarius A* is “1,000 times smaller” than M87, it’s also “1,000 times closer” so “it should appear very similar in the sky as M87.” However, the event horizon itself has never been imaged. The bright part in the center is the region surrounding Sagittarius A*. For instance, the star S0-2 is on a long, 16-year elliptical orbit around the black hole. Scientists know that it’s there from its influence on its surrounding environment, but they’ve never seen it directly. Sagittarius A*, for comparison, is located about 27,000 light-years from us and is 4 million times the mass of the sun. M87 is located about 55 million light-years from Earth and weighs in at about 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun, much larger than Sagittarius A*. The black hole is located at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87). The EHT team compiled the image from eight telescopes on five continents working over an observing period of seven days. Here’s the background - In April 2019, a group of more than 200 astronomers from all over the world unveiled the very first image of a black hole. Using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) - the same telescope used to capture the first-ever image of a black hole - scientists are currently working toward capturing the first image of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*.Īnd when Inverse talked to Event Horizon Telescope astronomers, they suggested we could finally see our galaxy’s behemoth by the end of the year. It was Centaurus A, some 12 million light-years away from our Solar System. An image released Monday brought a massive black hole and its violent jets into focus.īut yet again, it wasn’t our own galaxy’s black hole.
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