The thin white circles indicate sizes of orbits of planets in the solar system. M87*, on the left, is 2,000 times bigger than Sagittarius A*, on the right. But because Sagittarius A* is 2,000 times closer to Earth than M87*, the Event Horizon Telescope was able to observe both black holes at a similar resolution – giving astronomers a chance to learn about the universe by comparing the two. The black hole at the center of this galaxy, named M87*, is a behemoth 2,000 times larger than Sagittarius A* and 7 billion times the mass of the Sun. In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope team released the first image of a black hole – this one at the center of the galaxy M87.
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The processing time was equivalent to running 2,000 laptops at full speed for a year.
They then blended all of these images together to produce the final, beautiful, accurate image. To turn it all into an accurate image, team used supercomputers to produce millions of different images, each one a mathematically viable version of the black hole based off the data collected and the laws of physics. Every night generated so much data that the team couldn’t send it through the internet – they had to ship physical hard drives to where they processed the data.īecause black holes are so hard to see, there is a lot of uncertainty in the data the telescopes collect. The team used eight radio telescopes spread across the globe to collect data on the black hole over the course of five nights in 2017. The researchers used eight telescopes from around the globe – located at the points where the white lines intersect – to act as a single, massive telescope. Scientists had previously been able to calculate that Sagittarius A* is 16 million miles (26 million kilometers) in diameter. The size of a black hole is defined by its event horizon – a distance from the center of the black hole within which nothing can escape. Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez later shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery. Their motions suggested that at the center of the Milky Way was a black hole 4 million times the mass of the Sun.
They saw stars whirling around a dark object at speeds up to a third of the speed of light. In the 1980s, two teams of astronomers started tracking the motions of stars near this mysterious source of radio waves. For decades, astronomers have been measuring blasts of radio waves from an extremely compact source there. Sagittarius A* sits at the the center of our Milky Way galaxy, in the direction of the Sagittarius constellation. Chris Impey, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, explains how the team got this image and why it is such a big deal. On May 12, 2022, astronomers on the Event Horizon Telescope team released an image of a black hole called Sagittarius A* that lies at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
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