Washington, May 12 (BUS): The world’s first image of the chaotic supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy depicts not a voracious cosmic destroyer but what astronomers on Thursday called a “gentle giant” on a near-starvation diet.
Astronomers believe that nearly all galaxies, including our own, have these giant black holes at their bustling and crowded center, where no light and matter can escape, making it extremely difficult to get images of them.
The light is bent and twisted around by gravity as it is sucked into the abyss along with the sheltered gas and dust, according to the Associated Press.
The color image revealed Thursday is from the international consortium behind the Event Horizon Telescope, a group of eight synchronized radio telescopes around the world. Getting a good photo was a challenge; Previous efforts found a black hole to be very fickle.
“It just made noise and gurgling when we looked at it,” said Ferial Ozil of the University of Arizona.
She called it a “gentle giant” while announcing the breakthrough with other astronomers involved in the project.
The image also confirms Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity: a black hole is exactly the size that Einstein’s equations dictate. It is about the size of Mercury’s orbit around our sun.
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