Black hole: First picture of Milky Way monster

[Rick]

Black hole: First picture of Milky Way monster

Known as Sagittarius A*, the object is a staggering four million times the mass of our Sun.

What you see is a central dark region where the hole resides, circled by the light coming from super-heated gas accelerated by immense gravitational forces.

More: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61412463

[Mac]

Nasa released an image back in 2013 of the black hole, https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/black-hole-SagittariusA.html
So technically its not the first, plus there are other images and videos of the stars all orbiting the black hole.

Its still a cool image though.
and gets a lot more people interested.

Mac.

[Rick]

It'd be interesting to see those various images at the same scale.

[Mac]

This was also interesting.

A Time lapse of the stars orbiting the black hole.
Taken over a few weekends.
(1000) ish. 

20 year time lapse

20 year time lapse Sagatarius A black hole.

[Rick]

I remember seeing the first video of those stars quite a few years back ( See http://forum.orpington-astronomy.org.uk/index.php?topic=4094.0 from 2008). Interesting to see another decade-or-so's worth of data added to it, though.

[Rick]

Pictured: Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way

Eight ground-based telescopes located around the world were used to capture light from Sgr A* starting in 2017. Researchers gathered 3.5 petabytes of observations and fed that into complex image-processing algorithms running on supercomputers to construct the image. The data from these telescopes have to be carefully compared and processed; scientists have to take into account factors such as instrument position and the rotation of the Earth to build up a stable, direct image.

"The mass and distance of the object were known very precisely before our observations," said Luciano Rezzolla, professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at Goethe University Frankfurt, this week.

"We thus used these tight constraints on the size of the shadow to rule out other compact objects – such as boson stars or wormholes – and conclude that: 'What we're seeing definitely looks like a black hole.'"

More: https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/14/sagittarius_black_hole/