The National Science Foundation of the United States, together with the team of researchers from Event Horizon Telescope, published on Thursday the first photo of the black hole in the center of our galaxy, Sagitarius A.
The discovery was made by a team of 300 astronomers from around the world, who worked together and coordinated. Event Horizon Telescope is a network of eight radio telescopes spread across the globe. It took seven years to process and refine the images.
Located 26,000 light-years from our Sun, Sagittarius A is a supermassive black hole with a mass four million times that of the Sun. A black hole cannot be observed directly, because the immense gravity of the celestial body does not allow light to leave the gravitational field either. Instead, the scientists were able to observe the matter around it, which is attracted at a speed close to the speed of light and “swallowed” by the black hole and which forms a bright ring that surrounds the star.
It was the same team of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project who took the first photo of a black hole, 3 years ago, a “revolutionary result” in the field of astrophysics.
The image of the black hole in Galaxy M87 was released on April 10, 2019. The black hole, described by astronomers as a “monster,” is about 40 billion kilometers in diameter — three million times the size of Earth — and it is located 500 million light-years away.
The reflective glow of the photo brought to mind one of the 1990s biggest songs: Soundgarden’s 1994 hit “Black Hole Sun” and a group of longtime fans have started a petition to name the black hole after Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell, who died suddenly in May 2017 in a pretty strange circumstance. The suicide version has not been elucidated yet.