![]() “Since we don't know when the missing keys should be hit, there’s an endless number of possible tunes that could be playing,” she said. Bouman likened the imaging process to that of trying to guess a song played on a piano that is missing keys. Making a perfect image would require having pairs of dishes with all possible separations and orientations, which the EHT doesn’t have.Įarth’s rotation helps fill in some gaps, but it isn’t enough-said Katie Bouman, an engineer at Caltech who coleads EHT’s imaging group. The dishes work in pairs, and the image resolution depends on the pair separations and orientations relative to the object of interest. But it took significantly longer for the team to put the Sag A* picture together-a process that required using different “snapshots” from the EHT radio dishes. The data for this image, like the data used for the image of M87*, were collected in 2017. If the bending is substantial, the object can be confirmed as a black hole. The telescope collects light emitted from glowing gas orbiting around a target object, allowing scientists to “see” how the object’s gravity bends light. To image Sag A*, scientists used the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)-a global network of eight radio dishes that simultaneously gather data. But, with no visual evidence, scientists were unable to confirm that idea. “The stars gave us a tight prediction for something that was completely unseen,” he says. Scientists have long suspected that this object is a black hole because of the way stars orbit around it, said Michael Johnson, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who worked on making this image. Sagittarius A* (Sag A* for short) sits 26,000 light years from Earth and has a mass about 4 million times that of the Sun. That image-revealed earlier today at multiple press conferences around the world-shows a glowing orb with a distinct black spot in its center. “Today, the Event Horizon Telescope is delighted to share with you the first direct image of the gentle giant in the center of our Galaxy, Sagittarius A*,” said Feryal Özel, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Those same scientists have now unveiled the second-ever black hole image, which shows a dark object much closer to home. Three years ago, researchers revealed the first ever picture of a black hole, which depicted a supermassive black hole over 50 million light years away from Earth, in a galaxy called M87. EHT Image of the black hole at the center of our Galaxy, as captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).
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