![]() ![]() ![]() Scientists had expected the Milky Way's black hole to be more violent, especially since the only other image from another galaxy shows a far bigger and more active black hole. ![]() She said the image of “my baby” is exactly how it should be - an eerie-looking orange-red ring with utter blackness in the middle. She wasn't part of the telescope team bu t earned a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the Milky Way's black hole in the 1990s. ![]() “Pictures of black holes are the hardest thing to think about,” said astronomer Andrea Ghez of the University of California, Los Angeles. It is about the size of the orbit of Mercury around our sun.īlack holes gobble up galactic material but Ozel said this one is “eating very little.” It's the equivalent to a person eating a single grain of rice over millions of years, another astronomer said. The picture also confirms Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity: The black hole is precisely the size that Einstein's equations dictate. She described it as a “gentle giant” while announcing the breakthrough along with other astronomers involved in the project. “It burbled and gurgled as we looked at it,” the University of Arizona's Feryal Ozel said. Getting a good image was a challenge previous efforts found the black hole too jumpy. The colourized image unveiled Thursday is from an international consortium behind the Event Horizon Telescope, a collection of eight synchronized radio telescopes around the world. Light gets bent and twisted around by gravity as it gets sucked into the abyss along with super heated gas and dust. The world's first image of the chaotic supermassive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy doesn't portray a voracious cosmic destroyer but what astronomers Thursday called a “gentle giant” on a near-starvation diet.Īstronomers believe nearly all galaxies, including our own, have these giant black holes at their bustling and crowded centre, where light and matter cannot escape, making it extremely hard to get images of them. ![]()
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