The black hole at the center of our Milky Way in the first photo

Scientists have published the first real photos of a huge black hole, which lies at the center of our Milky Way.

An international team of scientists led by Geoffrey Bower and Huib Jan van Langevelde of the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (European Southern Observatory) has published the results of their extensive project. They took the first pictures of the black hole Sagittarius A* using the Event Horizon Telescope. It is located at the center of the Milky Way, the spiral galaxy that contains planet Earth. These are also the very first images of a supermassive black hole.

It is impossible to see the black hole itself, because it is absolutely dark. Surrounding it is a luminous gas called a shadow. The Event Horizon Telescope took the first pictures of a black hole and its shadow. The telescope itself is virtual and consists of 8 real radio observatories combined into one system. He worked several nights in a row, collecting dozens of hours of information. The Event Horizon telescope was already working in 2017, but it was only now possible to process the data and take a picture. Scientists compared this to using a slow shutter speed on a mirrored camera. The resulting images are definitive proof that there is a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

The Sagittarius A* radio source is a supermassive black hole located 27,000 light-years from our sun. The existence of the object was first discussed at the end of the last century, but its existence could not be proven until 2020. Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the black hole.