Black holes: Scientists successfully photograph the supermassive energy centre in the Milky way

The first photograph of the supermassive black hole situated in the center of the Milky Way and about 26,0000 light-years from the Earth was made public by the astronomers of the Event Horizon Telescope last week. For the project, 300 researchers worked together.

The first-ever picture of a black hole was captured not before 2019, located in a distant galaxy called Messier 87 and known as black hole M87.

The black holes are formed as stars collapse, leading to a space in the universe with escape velocity, i.e. the speed required to overcome a planet’s gravitational pull. Black holes have such high gravity that even light cannot get out of them. A lot of matter gets sucked into its space and hence to track them spatial telescopes and special tools are required.

So interesting are these black holes that in 2020none half of the year’s Nobel Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy was given in physics to Roger Penrose and the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for furthering the understanding of black holes.

The astrophysicists found that the orbit of a collapsed star in the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way is manned by an invisible heavy object. This extremely heavy object has a mass equivalent to 4 million solar masses and is packed into an area about the size of our solar system.

This is evidence enough that there is an invisible supermassive object there and that being a black hole is a reasonable explanation. Physicists were studying it for 50 years now. Hence the noble awardees Genzel and Ghez developed methods using the world’s largest telescope to locate the blackhole and picture it.

Now the scientists have come up with a probability that the black hole could most likely be hiding in Sagittarius A*, a source of radio waves around which all stars in the Milky Way orbit.

The black hole photograph and what it establishes

The photograph is proof that what scientists had been looking for for so long exists. To the astronomers, the black hole appeared to be the same size as the moon or donut.

To observe the black hole, a powerful Event Horizon Telescope was developed and Sagittarius A was observed every night. Data was collected, in an exercise similar to using long exposure time on a camera.

Scientists think that the new pictures offer the opportunity to understand how they compare and contrast.