Henry Brean The team that produced the first picture of a black hole has revealed a new, never-before-captured image of the supermassive singularity churning away at the center of our own galaxy.The black hole known as Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* , resembles a fiery, fuzzy donut in the images painstakingly assembled by the international Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.
Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration University of Arizona scientists, from left, Feryal Özel, Chi-Kwan Chan and Dimitrios Psaltis, are among 36 University of Arizona researchers,… The site in Antarctica proved especially valuable, because its view of the black hole, 25,640 light years away, is never blocked by the tilt or rotation of the Earth.
In the resulting image, Sgr A* looks a lot like M87*, the first black hole ever photographed by the EHT team or anyone else. But the two objects are actually very different. But the swirl of material around the much smaller Sgr A* changes by the minute, leaving scientists to make sense of an object that “burbled and gurgled as we looked at it,” Özel said.