{"id":3910,"date":"2022-05-19T11:50:29","date_gmt":"2022-05-19T11:50:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/black-hole-in-the-heart-of-the-milky-way-imaged-for-the-first-time\/"},"modified":"2025-01-15T06:25:55","modified_gmt":"2025-01-15T06:25:55","slug":"black-hole-in-the-heart-of-the-milky-way-imaged-for-the-first-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/black-hole-in-the-heart-of-the-milky-way-imaged-for-the-first-time","title":{"rendered":"Black hole in the heart of the Milky Way imaged for the first time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Almost four decades ago, a team of astronomers noticed a dark object with stars whirling around it at roughly a third of the speed of light. Last week, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration team revealed an image of this dark object\u2014a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. It has been named Sagittarius A* or Sgr A* (pronounced sadge-ay-star). <\/i>The research team\u2019s findings1<\/sup> have been published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters<\/i>.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In 2017, the EHT team used a network of eight radio telescopes spread across four continents to collect massive amounts of data on Sgr A*, by capturing images of the clouds of gas surrounding the black hole. They transformed all the data into millions of images using supercomputers and eventually generated a final, composite, and accurate image of the black hole.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This is not the first time that astronomers have imaged a black hole. In 2019, another supermassive black hole\u2014M87*, in the galaxy Messier 87\u2014was the first to be imaged.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Facts about Sgr A*<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n