Three telescopes were added to the EHT network before the most recent observing campaign in March 2022, which means future pictures should be sharper and should illuminate subtle details in the areas around black holes. It isn’t clear why there is this mismatch in the spin axes of the black hole and the Milky Way, but it could be related to ancient events in which Sgr A* may have devoured black holes at the centres of smaller galaxies.Īs researchers continue to analyse the black hole data and figure out how the two black holes compare to one another, they also have a new set of observations to examine. Instead of viewing the black hole and its disc from the side, we appear to be viewing it face-on. The only thing that doesn’t line up with what was expected is that the accretion disc around Sgr A* appears to be tilted out of alignment with the disc of the galaxy. “Einstein’s doing well, again, and for people who have all their other theories of what gravity could be it might be a little disappointing.” “One of the things which surprises me personally was just how similar these images are to what theory predicts,” says Younsi. When the researchers compared the image of Sgr A* to a library of hundreds of thousands of simulated black holes modelled in scenarios that do not follow general relativity, they found that Sgr A* appears to hew closely to relativistic models. The gravitational pull of Sgr A* is so strong that it bends the light, making the plasma circling towards us appear brighter than that spinning away towards the black hole’s backside. The most visible prediction of general relativity is that the ring of light around the black hole ought to be a little lopsided. This makes them impossible to see directly, and so astronomers have had to use a variety of clever techniques to confirm that they actually exist.

To make the final image, they aggregated many snapshots taken over several nights and used a supercomputer to process the data.īlack holes are objects with an intense gravitational pull so strong that not even beams of light, the fastest things in the universe, can escape. It’s the first direct observation confirming the presence of the black. “This means the brightness and pattern of the gas around Sgr A* was changing rapidly as the EHT collaboration was observing it – a bit like trying to take a clear picture of a puppy quickly chasing its tail,” said EHT researcher Chi-kwan Chan at the University of Arizona in a statement.Īdding to the difficulty was the fact that Earth sits towards the edge of the Milky Way, so the researchers had to deal with light from all the stars, dust and gas between our planet and Sgr A*. For the first time, astronomers have captured an image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. As a result, it takes days to weeks for the plasma around M87* to complete an orbit, whereas it takes only minutes for hot plasma to circle Sgr A*. M87* is one of the largest known black holes in the universe at about 6.5 billion times the mass of the sun, more than 1000 times the mass of Sgr A*. That process occurs much more quickly with this black hole than with M87*, which is one reason why the new image took so much longer to produce.

First picture of black hole