New Delhi: Astronomers on Thursday revealed the first image of the black hole captured at the centre of the Milky Way. The image was produced by an international research team, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, using the observations from a worldwide network of radio telescopes. The finding, that was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, shows that the object is a black hole and proves the working of such giants that are believed to be present at the centre of most galaxies.
According to a report by news agency PTI, the image is of a supermassive object that resides at the centre of our galaxy. This finding was unveiled at simultaneous press conferences around the world, including the European Southern Observatory headquarters in Germany.
“We were stunned by how well the size of the ring agreed with predictions from Einstein's Theory of General Relativity," PTI quoted EHT Project Scientist, Geoffrey Bower, from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, as saying.
He further added, "These unprecedented observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very centre of our galaxy, and offer new insights on how these giant black holes interact with their surroundings.
According to the researchers, in the image, although we cannot see the black hole because it’s completely dark, the glowing gas around it shows a tell-tale signature, a dark central region (called shadow) surrounded by a bright ring-like structure.
They added that the image captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole which is four million times more than our Sun.
Since the black hole is around 27,000 light-years away from the Earth, it appears to have about the same size as a doughnut on the Moon in the sky.
To capture the image, the research team created the powerful EHT, which linked together eight existing radio observatories across the planet to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope.