![]() Eight telescopes gathered views of Sagittarius A* over the course of 10 consecutive nights. The new images were taken in April 2017 during the same window in which the EHT was taking the now-famous image of M87’s black hole. “These results are coming five years after the observations.” “It took us two years to publish the M87 results,” said Huib Jan van Langevelde of Leiden University in the Netherlands, director of the EHT. “The material was swirling around Sag A* so quickly that Sag A*’s appearance could change from minute to minute,” said Katie Bouman, a computer scientist now at the California Institute of Technology who helped develop an algorithm to turn vast amounts of EHT data into an image. ![]() ![]() Because it is relatively small, any activity on Sagittarius A* - such as the motion of the trillion-degree plasma that surrounds it - occurs 1,000 times faster than it does on M87’s black hole. Sagittarius A* is small - just 30 times wider than our sun - and 27,000 light-years distant. In order to take an image of Sagittarius A*, the researchers had to confront unique observational challenges. No matter their size, or the environment they live in, once you arrive at the edge of a black hole, gravity takes over.” “This similarity reveals to us a key aspect of black holes. “We were amazed that Sag A* looked so similar to the famous black hole in the M87 galaxy,” said Issaoun. But despite these differences, the two images look remarkably alike.
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