Astronomers capture image of Milky Way’s black hole

“Gentle giant” said to be on diet of near-starvation

The world’s first image of the chaotic 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, including our own, have these giant black holes at their center, where light and matter cannot escape, making it extremely hard to get images of them.

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.

University of Arizona’s Feryal Ozel described it as a “gentle giant” while announcing the breakthrough along with other astronomers involved in the project. The picture also confirms Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity: The black hole is precisely the size that Einstein’s equations dictate. It is 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.”

Scientists had expected the Milky Way’s black hole to be more violent, especially since the only other image from another galaxy shows a far bigger and more active black hole.

“It is the cowardly lion of black holes,” said project scientist Geoffrey C. Bower of Taiwan’s Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Because the black hole “is on a starvation diet” so little material is falling into the center, and that allows astronomers to gaze deeper, Bower said.

The Milky Way black hole is called Sagittarius A* (with the asterisk denoting “star”). It’s near the border of Sagittarius and Scorpius constellations and is 4 million times more massive than our sun.

It is incredibly hot, trillions of degrees, Ozel said.

To get the picture, the eight telescopes had to coordinate so closely “in a process similar to everyone shaking hands with everyone else in the room,” said astronomer Vincent Fish of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The project cost nearly $60 million, with $28 million coming from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

EHT Collaboration / TNS This is the first image, and first direct visual evidence, of Sagittarius A* (pronounced “Sagittarius A-star”), the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope, an array which linked together eight existing radio observatories across the planet to form a single “Earth-sized” virtual telescope.