The observations of the EHT telescope network generated 3.5 petabytes of data–the equivalent of 100 million TikTok videos–which were combined using a sophisticated computer algorithm. From Earth, “it’s like looking for a tennis ball on the moon,” says University of Central Florida cosmologist James Cooney, who is not affiliated with the recent announcement. Despite its name, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy is quite small in the night sky.
The image gives greater insight into the mysteries of black holes and further confirms Einstein’s long-standing theory of relativity. “By correlating their signals and studying the resulting data, we can reconstruct images of the source. To do that, the team connected more than half a dozen telescopes around the globe using a technique called interferometry. “Our telescope has to be almost as big as the Earth,” said Vincent Fish, an astronomer at the MIT Haystack Observatory and EHT collaborator, at the event. The announcement represents the work of more that 300 researchers at 80 institutions, including the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, across the globe who turned a network of telescopes into a planet-sized observatory known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). “A better understanding of this black hole at the center of our galaxy will help us understand our cosmic origin story.” “We finally got a glimpse at our very own black hole,” says Angelo Ricarte, an EHT collaborator and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, in an interview. In a press conference today, astronomers unveiled the first image of this supermassive black hole -an orange and yellow donut with a dark center. But they have never seen what it is-until now. The existence of this supermassive blackhole called Sagittarius A* has been theorized for decades as astronomers observed nearby stars orbiting something invisible, compact and very massive at the center of the Milky Way. About 27,000 light-years away sits a massive astrophysical object, some four million times the mass of our sun, surrounded by swirling super-hot gasses.
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