But while the black hole in M87 can be observed from across 55 million light-years of empty intergalactic space, the Milky Way’s black hole is shrouded by layers of dust in the densest part of our galaxy, about 26,000 light-years away. ![]() That means it looks roughly the same size from Earth’s point of view, which makes it equally accessible to the Event Horizon Telescope. In contrast, the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way is 1,500 times smaller but, by cosmic coincidence, about 2,000 times closer. The images marks the second time the project has made astronomical history. The shape of the image “is the telltale sign of the black hole,” said Feryal Ozel, a project member and astronomer at the University of Arizona, during a news conference in Washington, D.C. Broderick and his colleagues have now created: a glowing, gaseous doughnut with a dark void at the centre. The glowing gas creates a backdrop against which the dark boundary of the black hole – its event horizon – can be seen in silhouette. But black holes also draw in hot, ionized gas torn from nearby stars or clouds of interstellar material. ![]() A black hole, by definition, is an object so dense that not even light can escape its powerful gravitational pull. ![]() The goal may seem like a contradiction in terms. Broderick is a long-time member of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, a project that harnesses radio observatories around the globe for the sole purpose of revealing what a black hole really looks like.
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