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upstart writes:

We finally have an image of the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way:

Astronomers announced May 12 that they have finally assembled an image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

"This image shows a bright ring surrounding the darkness, the telltale sign of the shadow of the black hole," astrophysicist Feryal Özel of the University of Arizona in Tucson said at a news conference announcing the result.

The black hole, known as Sagittarius A*, appears as a faint silhouette amidst the glowing material that surrounds it. The image reveals the turbulent, twisting region immediately surrounding the black hole in new detail. The findings also were published May 12 in 6 studies in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

[...] . By combining about 3.5 petabytes of data, or the equivalent of about 100 million TikTok videos, captured in April 2017, researchers could begin to piece together the picture. To tease out an image from the initial massive jumble of data, the EHT team needed years of work, complicated computer simulations and observations in various types of light from other telescopes.

[...] . This won't be the last eye-catching image of Sgr A* from EHT. Additional observations, made in 2018, 2021 and 2022, are still waiting to be analyzed.

"This is our closest supermassive black hole," Haggard says. "It is like our closest friend and neighbor. And we've been studying it for years as a community. [This image is a] really profound addition to this exciting black hole we've all kind of fallen in love with in our careers."

Journal Reference:
Six papers in ApJ Lett, 2022

See also:
Wits scientists in the team that made the first image of the black hole in the centre of our galaxy
Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy
Groundbreaking image of black hole Sagittarius A* enhanced by UTSA physics professor Richard Anantua's research
First Image of the Beastly Black Hole at the Heart of Our Galaxy
Sagittarius A* Revealed

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