Three years after the first photo of a black hole in 2019 which sits on the galaxy of Virgo, the international collaboration EHT unveiled Thursday, May 12 results presented as ” revolutionaries “: the image of a black hole very close to the galaxy where the Earth is located, the Milky Way.
It sits like a gargantua in the center of the Milky Way, in the constellation of Sagittarius, from which it takes its name elsewhere: Sagittarius A*, a super massive black hole, has just been unveiled by the international network of telescopes terrestrial EHT. Our entire galaxy revolves around it, which is 4 million times heavier than our sun, over 6 million kilometers in diameter. Consider a monster, seen for the first time.
Since a black hole does not emit light – on the contrary, it swallows it – it is extremely rare to be able to observe its immediate environment, and see its border, beyond which nothing ever emerges. , is ” the event horizon as it is called. Hence the name of the international EHT network, i.e. ” Event Horizon telescope in English, from the European Southern Observatory (Eso).
The EHT had succeeded in April 2019 in taking an image of M87* in the center of the Virgo galaxy, which for two years was the first and only photo of a black hole.
There ” silhouette of the black hole silhouetted against a glowing disc of matter is reminiscent of the black hole in the distant galaxy M87, which is much larger than our own. Scientists see it as proof that the same mechanisms of physics are at work at the heart of two systems of very different sizes.
Scientists have deployed the big game for this announcement, press conferences are organized simultaneously in seven cities around the world.