‘We Have a Donut’: Astronomers React to First Image of Milky Way’s Black Hole – Gizmodo

The first-ever image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

Image: EHT Collaboration

The fuzzy, bright-orange trappings of a cosmic beast that lurks in the heart of our galaxy made quite the impact today on scientists and space nerds alike. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration released its first image the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A*, in another major scientific milestone.

The group released the first image of a black hole—a distant monster called Messier 87*—in 2019, and now they’ve turned their telescopes closer to home. Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”), a source of radio waves at the center of our galaxy, has long been assumed to be a supermassive black hole. Now, we know it for sure.

“The wait is over. Meet the black hole at the center of our galaxy,” Feryal Özel, EHT modeling lead and a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Arizona, announced on Twitter Thursday morning with the hashtag #OurBlackHole.

Astronomers have been waiting for this moment since they laid eyes on the shadow of M87* back in 2019.

Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, recorded her live reaction to seeing the image of Sagittarius A* and posted the video on YouTube. “Oh my god, look at it,” Smethurst exclaims. “It’s so much more squashed than M87.”

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Sagittarius A* is about a thousand times smaller than the M87 black hole, weighing in at only 4 million times the mass of the Sun. It also looks quite a bit more like a donut, as some astronomers pointed out through a series of mostly Homer Simpson-related memes.

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Source: https://gizmodo.com/reactions-black-hole-milky-way-image-release-1848918887