This artist’s concept released on October 30, 2017 shows a black hole with an accretion disk.
Washington:
Dwelling at the center of our spiral Milky Way is a monster – a supermassive black hole 4 million times the mass of our sun and consuming any matter including gas, dust and stars stray in its colossal gravity.
The scientists used the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global network of working observatories to observe radio sources associated with black holes, to study the band. This galaxy and made an announcement on Thursday that the signals may have finally secured its image. The black hole is called Sagittarius A*, or SgrA*.
The researchers involved in this international collaboration declined to disclose the nature of their announcement ahead of scheduled press conferences but issued a news release calling it a “media groundbreaking result. our galactic center.”
In 2019, the EHT team published the first photo https://eventhorizontelescope.org/press-release-april-10-2019-astronomers-capture-first-image-black-hole of a black hole. The image – a bright red, yellow and white ring surrounding the dark center – shows the supermassive black hole at the center of another galaxy known as Messier 87, or M87.
The researchers also focused their work on Sagittarius A*, located about 26,000 light-years from Earth — the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion miles) from Earth. trillion kilometers).
“One of the objects that we hope to be able to observe with the Event Horizon Telescope … is our own black hole in our own backyard,” says astrophysicist Sheperd Doeleman of the Event Horizon Telescope. Harvard Center for Astrophysics – Smithsonian, former EHT project director, said in July 2021 scientific presentation.
Black holes are extremely dense objects with gravity so strong that not a single ray of light can escape.
There are different types of black holes. The smallest holes known as stellar-mass black holes are formed by the collapse of individual high-mass stars at the end of their life cycles. There are also medium-mass black holes, whose mass increases by an order of magnitude. And finally the supermassive black holes that reside at the centers of most galaxies. They are thought to have arisen relatively soon after their galaxies were formed, gobbling up large amounts of matter to attain colossal sizes.
The EHT project was started in 2012 to attempt to directly observe the surroundings of a black hole. The event horizon of a black hole is the point of no return from which anything – stars, planets, gas, dust, and all forms of electromagnetic radiation – is dragged into oblivion.
The fact that black holes do not allow light to escape makes observing them quite difficult. The project’s scientists searched for a ring of light – superheated disrupted matter and radiation circling at tremendous speed at the edge of the event horizon – around a region of shadow representing a black hole. reality. This is called the shadow or silhouette of the black hole.
Known as a spiral galaxy, the Milky Way looks like a spinning pinwheel from above, with our sun perched on one of the spiral arms and Sagittarius A* at the centre. The galaxy contains at least 100 billion stars.
The black hole M87 is much more distant and massive than Sagittarius A*, located about 54 million light-years from Earth with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun. In revealing the image of that black hole, the researchers say their work shows that Albert Einstein, the famous theoretical physicist, correctly predicted that the shape of the shadow was almost a circle. perfect.
Thursday’s announcement will be made during simultaneous press conferences in the United States, Germany, China, Mexico, Chile, Japan and Taiwan. Dutch radio astronomer Huib Jan van Langevelde is currently the director of the EHT project.
Doeleman emphasizes the size scale of supermassive black holes.
Doeleman said: “There are big things and we are small. “But it’s also kind of uplifting in a way. We have a lot to explore in the universe.”
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and was automatically generated from the feed provided.)
