has event horizon telescope seen a blackhole

Minniti DSS, Nogueras-Lara et al., Schoedel, NACO, GRAVITY Collaboration, EHT Collaboration (Music: Azul Cobalto) The black hole is shown by a dark central region called a shadow, surrounded by a ring of luminous gas and dust. Finally, we arrive at Sgr A*, the first image of which has been captured by the EHT collaboration. The stars here have been observed with ESO’s Very Large Telescope and ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer for decades, the black hole’s immense gravitational pull distorting the orbits of the stars closest to it. Beginning with a broad view of the Milky Way, we dive into the dense clouds of gas and dust at our galactic center. Watch as this video sequence zooms into the black hole (Sgr A*) at the center of our galaxy. The new view captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole, which is four million times more massive than our Sun. Located in the Atacama Desert in Chile, ALMA is the most sensitive of all the observatories in the EHT array, and ESO is a co-owner of ALMA on behalf of its European Member States.Ĭredit: ESO/José Francisco Salgado (), EHT CollaborationĪlthough we cannot see the black hole itself, because it is completely dark, glowing gas around it reveals a telltale signature: a dark central region (called a shadow) surrounded by a bright ring-like structure. Highlighted in the box is the image of Sagittarius A* taken by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration. “It shows the super-energetic gas that’s expelled in jets from the poles of the black hole,” said Professor Davies, who was not involved in the study.This image shows the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) looking up at the Milky Way as well as the location of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at our galactic center. The new images capture the jet processes in super-sharp detail, said Tamara Davis, an astrophysicist at the University of Queensland. It’s just being seen on quite different mass and size scales,” Dr Edwards said. The finding suggests black holes are governed by similar processes regardless of their size. These glowing features were remarkably similar to those seen in jets produced by other supermassive black holes, including the one within M87. Something that stood out about this energetic cone of gas was its hollow centre and unusually bright edges. The relatively fine-scale observations allowed the team to peer deep into the intricate structure of the jet blasting from the black hole, which flings gas more than a million light-years into space. This new observation was at a resolution 16 times sharper than previous ones. (Submillimetre) NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. ( Supplied: ESO/WFI (Optical) MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al. To put that in perspective, one light-day is the distance of three return trips from the Sun to Neptune.Īstronomers have pinpointed the location of the supermassive black hole at the centre of Centaurus A, one of the brightest galaxies in the sky. The researchers could zoom in on Centaurus A's black hole and see structures that were less than a light-day wide. With a mass of 55 million Suns, Centaurus A's supermassive black hole is a fraction the size of M87’s, which has a mass of six-and-a-half-billion Suns.īut it is much more massive than Sagittarius A, the supermassive black hole in the middle of our home galaxy the Milky Way, which is around 4 million Suns. Peering into the heart of a black holeĭr Edwards and his colleagues aimed the Event Horizon Telescope – an network of eight radio telescopes spanning the globe – at Centaurus A.Īt a mere 12 million light-years away, Centaurus A was an ideal candidate for getting a close-up look at a supermassive black hole.

'We see these as jets of plasma being accelerated at speeds very close to the speed of light away from the supermassive black hole,' Dr Edwards said. ( Supplied: Event Horizon Telescope)īut at the last moment, some gas particles manage to escape the jaws of these cosmic monsters and are instead blown far into space. The first image of a black captured by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2019.

Has event horizon telescope seen a blackhole