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Astronomers last week revealed the first image of the supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy not so far, far away – our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

Scientists had previously observed stars orbiting around something invisible, compact and very massive at the centre of the Milky Way. Known as Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, the object was strongly believed to be a black hole.

The first image of Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration is the international research team behind this groundbreaking achievement, involving over 300 scientists from 80 institutions around the globe. The EHT team linked together eight existing radio observatories across the planet to form a single Earth-sized virtual telescope to provide the first direct visual evidence of Sgr A*. The telescope is named after the event horizon, the boundary of the black hole beyond which no light can escape.

It is just the second image of a black hole to be captured after EHT revealed the first-ever image of M87* in the distant Messier 87 galaxy in 2019. Read more in the original article: University of Toronto

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