Recent Hubble Space Telescope observations have bolstered the theory that supermassive black holes get their start in the dusty cores of starburst galaxies, where new stars are rapidly churned out, but scientists are still chipping away at the problem.īlack holes don't have surfaces, like on a planet or star. Many astrophysicists and cosmologists believe these behemoths lurk at the center of virtually all galaxies. The star's material then collapses onto itself, condensing into a relatively tiny area.īut how supermassive black holes, millions to billions of times more massive than the sun, form is even more mysterious than typical stellar black holes.
The most common kind, called a stellar black hole, is often thought to be the result of an enormous star dying in a supernova explosion. But the hole, often anthropomorphized in pop culture as a space monster, is actually quite "gentle," researchers say, consuming relatively little from its environment.īlack holes are some of the most elusive things in outer space. All around it are stars zipping in varied directions. Its Milky Way home, a spiral galaxy, is fairly flat, but the center sinks down where the supermassive black hole sits. To make a difficult number to grasp even more unfathomable, imagine this: The sun's mass is equal to 333,000 Earths. Scientists estimate it to be 4 million times more massive than the sun. Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short, is considerably smaller, at some 27 million miles across, but it's no pipsqueak. Credit: National Science Foundation / Keyi "Onyx" Li This graphic shows how much larger the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87 is than Sagittarius A* (which lies at the center of our Milky Way galaxy). These two images look similar because they are the consequence of fundamental forces of gravity." "We now know that, in both cases, what we see is the heart of the black hole, the point of no return. "Now we know that it wasn't a coincidence - it wasn't some aspect of the environment that happened to look like the ring that we expected to see," she said at the news event in Washington, D.C. The second photo provides powerful confirmation to the scientific community, said Feryal Özel, a professor of astronomy and physics from the University of Arizona. Astronomers say that black hole, dubbed M87*, is as large as Earth's eight-planet solar system. The first photo, revealed in April 2019, showcased the black hole that resides at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, an easier target to capture because of its size, despite its being much farther, at about 53 million light-years away. The image of Sagittarius A*, pronounced "Sagittarius A-Star," is a monumental achievement, the second such time scientists have overcome the barrier of invisibility to glimpse a black hole. Spokespeople from the Event Horizon Telescope, the international collaboration of 300 scientists who worked on the feat, hosted simultaneous press conferences in at least seven countries to share the news, including the United States at the National Press Club in the nation's capital. The breakthrough was also published in the science journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.
This object, seen in the photo at the top of this story, is the real deal, each pixel representing a Herculean effort: hundreds of scientists from 80 institutions around the globe, working together to collect, process, and piece together fragments of data. Up until three years ago, any depiction of a black hole was merely an artist's interpretation or a computer model of what the spinning, spacetime-bending phenomenon might look like. The image was colorized so that human eyes could perceive it. The photo showed a region in deep space reminiscent of a solar eclipse - a darkened circle, wreathed in a radiant red-orange fuzz of light.
Though black holes are by definition unseeable - light can't travel fast enough to escape their clutches - Sagittarius A* revealed itself in the form of a black shadow surrounded by the bright glow of the gas and debris swirling around its perimeter. Astronomers have at long last seen the center of the Milky Way galaxy, unmasking a giant black hole, a celestial vortex 26,000 light-years from Earth that should otherwise be hidden from sight.Īn international team of researchers released on Thursday a snapshot of the supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A*, spied through the power of eight linked radio dishes from around the world that together can penetrate through gas clouds in outer space.