Sagittarius A*: Milky Way’s Central Black Hole

Recently, scientists have unveiled a closeby black hole with the Event Horizon Telescope as an international collaboration. This is a monster black hole. Let’s learn more about it below.

What is Sagittarius A*?

The image of a supermassive blackhole, Sagittarius Awas created by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which is made up of eight telescopes spread across four continents that work together to attain the sensitivity needed to see the black hole properly.

The mass of this supermassive black hole is around 4.1 million times the mass of our sun, and the sun is 333 thousand times the mass of Earth. That’s very big.

This black hole also has a huge ring around it, which is basically just gas. This gas is thought to be moving close to the speed of light.

This black hole is around 25,640 light-years from Earth or 1.57x10^17 miles. For comparison, Earth is 93 million miles from the sun.

This black hole confirmed many of Einsteins laws of relativity.

How it was Found

The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration published the first picture of Sagittarius A* on May 12, 2022. The picture, which was created using radio interferometer data from 2017, verifies the presence of a black hole in the object. Processing the above image required five years of mathematics. Eight radio observatories were used to collect data at six different locations.

This took the efforts of 80 institutions and more than 300 people.

Final Words

This is just the beginning of the Event Horizon Telescope. The team is continually analyzing other space occurrences and is expanding its frequencies.

Who knows what else we will find.

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