The first image evidence of a supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy

The international collaboration of EHT astronomers on Thursday photographed the presence of a Black hole Massive at the heart of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, three years after the first image of a black hole, located in a distant galaxy.

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The “silhouette” of a black hole shaded on a luminous disk of matter recalls the image of the black hole from afar. galaxy M87, which is much larger than ours. Scientists see this as evidence that the same mechanisms of physics are at work at the heart of two systems of very different sizes.

“I can show you an image of the Sgr A* black hole in the center of the galaxy,” EHT project manager Huib Jan Van Langevelde announced to applause at a press conference in Garching, Germany. Germany.

very dense object

Technically, you can’t see a black hole, because the object is so dense and its gravitational force is so strong that not even light can escape from it. But we can notice the material swirling around it before we swallow it.

“We have direct evidence that this object is a black hole,” explained Sarah Esson, of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, describing “the gas cloud (around the black hole) emitting radio waves that we observed.” Black holes are said to be stellar when they have a few masses of suns, or extremely massive when they have a mass of millions or even billions of suns.

His name is Sagittarius A*.

Sagittarius A * (Sgr A *), which owes its name to its discovery in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, has a mass of approximately four million suns It is 27000 light years away from Earth. Its existence has been assumed since 1974, with the discovery of an unusual radio source in the galactic center.

The EHT Network, an international network of eight radio astronomical observatories, had in 2019 brought the historical image of M87*, a supermassive black hole with a mass of six billion solar masses in its galaxy, Messier 87, located in 55 million years. -Light. With its solar mass of four million, Sgr A* is a featherweight in supermassive black holes.