Scientists on the Horizon Telescope project said they were able to obtain a shadow image of a supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way. The opening of the century!
International team of astronomers published the first image of the shadow black hole in the center of the Milky Way, according to DW.
This image is the first direct visual evidence of the existence of such an object in the center of our galaxy Milky Way, announced on Thursday, May 12, at a press conference researchers of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project. The black hole is 27,000 light-years from the Sun and is connected to the Sagittarius A * radio source.
“Our discovery shows that the object at the center of the galaxy is indeed a black hole,” said Anton Zensus, director of the Max Planck Research Institute of Radio Astronomy, at a news conference in Garching, Bavaria, adding: “Mission accomplished? Yes, but there is still a lot to do. ”
According to EHT scientist Jeffrey Bower of the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan, obtaining a black hole image from a network of powerful radio telescopes “improved our understanding of what is happening at the heart of our galaxy.” According to him, the first image of this phenomenon in the center of the Milky Way offers “a new understanding of how these giant black holes interact with their surroundings.” beyond their borders. To capture the shadow of the black hole, EHT used gas glow around the black hole.
For the first time, participants in the EHT project managed to capture the shadow of a supermassive black hole in 2019 – it is located in the center of the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 (M87) about 55 million light years from Earth.
Black hole in the center of the Milky Way , the shadow of which was recorded by scientists, is in the constellation Sagittarius, and therefore called Sagittarius A *, or abbreviated Sgr A *. Its existence has been suspected since 1974, after an unusual source of radio waves was discovered in the center of the Milky Way.
In the 1990s, we managed to map the orbits of the brightest stars near the center of our galaxy. This confirmed the presence of a supermassive compact object there. The only plausible explanation was the existence of a black hole – now there is direct visual evidence.
The black hole itself is not visible in the image, because it does not emit any radiation. But you can see the characteristic dark spot surrounded by a bright annular structure. Thus, the black hole resembles a giant orange donut.
Thomas Krichbaum of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy shared the details of the Event Horizon telescope. “Its sharpness is three million times higher than human vision,” – said the scientist. According to him, a person with this vision could, while drinking beer in a beer garden in Munich, examine the gas bubbles in a beer glass devastated by a visitor to a restaurant in New York.
More than 300 scientists from 80 countries have worked to prove the existence black hole for five years. They made a real image from several images of Sagittarius A *.
Read also: Astronomers have published a new image of the “heart” of the Milky Way
Confirmation of Albert Einstein's Prophecies
The study confirmed the predictions about the black holes of the physicist Albert Einstein, made in his general theory of relativity in 1915. “We were amazed at how well the observed ring size matched Einstein's general theory of relativity,” said EHT Bower, a researcher at the BHP. Census, Einstein “would be delighted with the experimental capabilities we have in this field today.” objects moving at the speed of light, including quanta of light itself. The border of this region is called the event horizon.
On April 10, 2019, a supermassive black hole was “photographed” for the first time in the center of the galaxy Messier 87, located 54 million light years from Earth.
