Black hole’s small appetite

The world’s first image of the chaotic supermassive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy doesn’t portray a voracious cosmic destroyer but what astronomers have called a ‘‘gentle giant’’ on a near-starvation diet. The colourised image unveiled yesterday is from an international consortium behind the Event Horizon Telescope, a collection of eight synchronised radio telescopes around the world. Astronomers worked with data collected in 2017 to get the image. The black hole, dubbed Sagittarius A, is near the border of the Sagittarius and Scorpius constellations, about 27,000 light years away, and is four million times more massive than our Sun. Black holes gobble up galactic material, but astronomers said Sagittarius A’s appetite was equivalent to a person eating a single grain of rice over millions of years. The same telescope group released the first black hole image, in 2019, from a galaxy 53 million light years away.