Scientists unveil image of Milky Way’s black hole

WASHINGTON — The world’s first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy doesn’t portray a voracious cosmic destroyer but what astronomers Thursday called a “gentle giant” on a near-starvation diet.

Astronomers believe nearly all galaxies have these giant black holes at their crowded centers, where light and matter cannot escape, making it difficult to get images of them. Light gets bent and twisted by gravity as it gets sucked into the abyss along with superheated gas and dust.

The colorized image unveiled Thursday is from an international consortium behind the Event Horizon Telescope, a collection of eight synchronized radio telescopes around the world. Getting a good image was a challenge; previous efforts found the black hole too jumpy.

Feryal Ozel of the University of Arizona described it as a “gentle giant” while announcing the breakthrough along with other astronomers involved in the project. The image confirms Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity: The black hole is the size that Einstein’s equations dictate — about the size of the orbit of Mercury around our sun.

Black holes gobble up galactic material, but Ozel said this one is “eating very little.”

“Pictures of black holes are the hardest thing to think about,” said astronomer Andrea Ghez of UCLA. She wasn’t part of the team but earned a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the Milky Way’s black hole in the 1990s. She said the image of “my baby” is how it should be — an eerie-looking orange-red ring with utter blackness in the middle.

The black hole is 4 million times more massive than the sun.

JOSE LUIS MAGANA/GETTY-AFP Astronomer Feryal Ozel shows images of the Milky Way’s black hole Thursday in Washington.