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Scientists on Thursday provided the first look at the monster lurking at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, unveiling an image of a supermassive black hole that devours any matter within its gargantuan gravitational pull.
The phenomena – called Sagittarius A, or SgrA – is only the second one to be imaged. The feat was accomplished by the same Event Horizon Telescope international collaboration that in 2019 unveiled the first photograph of a black hole – that one residing at the heart of a different galaxy.
Sagittarius A possesses four million times the mass of our sun and is located about 26,000 light years – the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km) – from Earth.
Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects with gravity so strong that not even light can escape, making viewing them a challenge. A black hole’s event horizon is the point of no return beyond which anything – stars, planets, gas, dust and all forms of electromagnetic radiation – is dragged into oblivion.
Project scientists have looked for a ring of light – super-heated disrupted matter and radiation circling at tremendous speed at the edge of the event horizon – around a region of darkness representing the actual black hole. This is known as the black hole’s shadow or silhouette.
The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy that contains at least 100 billion stars. Viewed from above or below it resembles a spinning pinwheel, with our sun situated on one of the spiral arms and Sagittarius A located at the centre.
Infinite gravity
Since the late 1960s astronomers have speculated that a supermassive black hole exists at the centre of every galaxy.
By definition a black hole cannot be seen. It is a place of infinite gravity where nothing escapes, not even light. The phenomena can only be inferred from the behaviour of objects around it such as stars and celestial gases.
The discovery of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy has been described by Trinity College Dublin (TCD) Andrews Professor of Astronomy Luciano Rezzolla as the “astronomical discovery of the century.”
The supermassive black hole is thought to have occurred when our galaxy was formed 13 billion years ago. It has the mass of four million suns and an “event horizon” – surface equivalent to the orbit of Mercury.
Dr Rezzolla said the team at TCD provided “theoretical contributions to the interpretations of the images. Our work consisted in understanding what this image means.” Dr Rezzolla added that the discovery proved that Albert Einstein was right when he posited the theory of black holes in 1916.
Einstein also posited there are worm holes in the universe between two black holes and a tunnel between them in which, theoretically, it is possible to travel faster than the speed of light and possibly even go back in time.
Dr Rezzolla said the supermassive black hole in our own galaxy is not a wormhole and all the speculation about the latter is “from Hollywood”.
The supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy is not the first one to be imaged. In 2019 the Event Horizon Telescope international collaboration imaged a supermassive black hole at the centre of M87 a huge galaxy 55 million light years away.
Paradoxically it was much easier to film despite being so far away as it is 1,600 times larger than Sagittarius A which is “only”, all things being relative in the universe, 27,000 light years away.
The Event Horizon Telescope is a global network of observatories working collectively to observe radio sources associated with black holes. The project was begun in 2012 to try to directly observe the immediate environment of a black hole. – Additional reporting Reuters