The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a linked array of nine radio telescopes in several areas of Earth, has just produced the first image of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy.
The international team of astronomers and other specialists was led by the Center for Astrophysics (CfA) at Harvard & Smithsonian, and representatives of the EHT project unveiled the stunning picture at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., shortly after 9 a.m. EDT today, in sync with six other news conferences in cities around the world. [hxxps://pweb.cfa.harvard.edu/news/astronomers-reveal-first-image-black-hole-heart-our-galaxy]
Harvard reported, “At the press conference in D.C., Michael Johnson, an astrophysicist at the CfA and a leading member of the EHT, said one of the key lessons from the project was that the black hole at the center of the Milky Way doesn’t appear to be pulling in as much material as others, making the environment more relatively stable.
The report continued, “The result provides overwhelming evidence that the object at the heart of our galaxy is indeed a black hole and yields valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the center of most galaxies.”
“This is our supermassive black hole,” said Peter Galison, director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative, a member of the EHT team, and the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in the History of Science and Physics. “This is at the center of where we live.”
The researchers were able to produce their final image, which isn’t just one picture but the average of thousands of images created using different computational methods to account for the movement of the gas, and which also accounts for the blur.
