What you see is a central dark region where the hole resides, circled by the light coming from super-heated gas accelerated by immense gravitational f

Black hole: First picture of Milky Way monster

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2022-05-12 14:00:05

What you see is a central dark region where the hole resides, circled by the light coming from super-heated gas accelerated by immense gravitational forces.

Fortunately, this monster is a long, long way away - some 26,000 light-years in the distance - so there's no possibility of us ever coming to any danger.

It's their second such image after releasing in 2019 a picture of the giant black hole at the heart of another galaxy called Messier 87, or M87. That object was more than a thousand times bigger at 6.5 billion times the mass of our Sun.

"But this new image is special because it's our supermassive black hole," said Prof Heino Falcke, one of the European pioneers behind the EHT project.

"This is in 'our backyard', and if you want to understand black holes and how they work, this is the one that will tell you because we see it in intricate detail," the German-Dutch scientist from Radboud University Nijmegen told BBC News.

At a distance of 26,000 light-years from Earth, Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short, is a tiny pinprick on the sky. To discern such a target requires incredible resolution.