See the first image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way

*This text was written by a columnist. TecMundo; finally learn more.

You know what’s at the center of the Milky Way?

we started to examine Milky Way When Galileo GalileiHe marked one of the first in 1610. telescopes to the night sky. He realized that the whitish trails in the night sky that we thought were clouds were actually thousands of individual stars.

Over the centuries, our understanding of the Milky Way and other galaxies has expanded considerably. We realize that we are not at the center of the galaxy, but 27,000 light-years from it. we understand that our galaxy It is relatively common and similar to other neighboring galaxies such as Andromeda. And we understand that all galaxies have a supermassive central hole (SMBH). And our SMBH?

The quest to understand our SMBH, called Sgtr A*, has progressed with technological development. For over 10 years, scientists have mapped the stars in the center of the Milky Way using the 8.2m VLT telescope (European Southern Observatory, ESO) in Chile and were able to extract key features of Sgtr A*. The only possibility could be the existence of a supermassive black hole.

These results were so important to science that they resulted in the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for Andrea Ghez (one of the few women to receive a Nobel), Roger Penrose, and Reinhard Genzel. In the video below we can see data of stars orbiting our SMBH.

While it was absolutely incredible, we still didn’t have a direct view of a black hole. But that changed with the EHT (Event Horizon Telescope) consortium’s SMBH image of a neighboring supermassive galaxy, M87, on April 10, 2019.

But how can we observe a black hole if by definition a black hole is a region with such gravity that light cannot escape? Well, what we’re directly observing is the last region before the black hole, which we call the event horizon.

A growing black hole will have a disk of material orbiting it. There is a boundary distance that this material and light can escape from, which is the event horizon. Any material closer to the black hole than the event horizon is doomed to never escape. And the disk of material we observed in 2019.

It’s finally time for our black hole, Sgtr A*. It has a mass of 4 million solar masses in a radius of 6 million kilometers, which is 15 times the distance between the Moon and Earth. Watching Sergeant A* with the EHT consortium is like watching a Ping Pong ball from afar from the Moon!

What is EHT?

EHT (Event Horizon Telescope) is an international consortium that includes several existing telescopes for the direct observation of supermassive black holes. The consortium includes more than 350 scientists and more than 100 institutes worldwide, with telescopes located in North and South America, Europe, South Africa and East Asia.

The telescope uses a technique called interferometry, which consists of combining the signals captured by several telescopes and combining them to create an almost Earth-sized telescope. The collaboration began in 2015 and has large antennas such as the ALMA telescope located in Chile.

Antennas are located in high altitude, remote and arid climates to avoid pollution of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Camila de Sa Freitascolumnist TecMundoHe holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in astronomy. He is currently a PhD student at the European Southern Observatory (Germany). The distinctive Galaxy Coroner explores evolutionary scenarios for galaxies and possible changes in the production of stars. He is on social media as @astronomacamila.