The ring’s white-hot plasma is estimated to be 10 billion Kelvin, or 18 billion degrees Fahrenheit. The bright ring encircles a dark center, described as the black hole’s “shadow.” This ring structure lies just outside the event horizon, or the point beyond which light cannot escape, and is the result of light being bent by the black hole’s enormous gravity. The resulting image reveals Sgr A* for the first time, in the form of a glowing, donut-shaped ring of light.
The researchers focused the EHT array on the center of our galaxy, 27,000 light years from Earth, cutting through our planet’s atmosphere and the turbulent plasma beyond our solar system. The image was created by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) - a global network of radio telescopes whose movements are choreographed so they function as one virtual, planet-sized telescope.
Now an international team of astronomers, including researchers at MIT’s Haystack Observatory, has captured the light around our own supermassive black hole, revealing for the first time, an image of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*, pronounced ‘sadge-ay-star’), the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy. But just beyond a black hole’s point of no return, light persists, and its patterns, like a photo negative, can reveal a black hole’s lurking presence. Their pull is inescapable, forever trapping any light that falls into their gravitational abyss.
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