The 4 million solar masses of Sgr A* would fit inside the orbit of Mercury. The 6.5 billion solar masses making up the black hole in M-87 would fill the entire solar system. The black hole at the center of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short (pronounced Sag A-star), is much closer, about 26,000 light years from Earth, but it is much smaller.
Its enormous gravity pulls surrounding material into a disc, accelerating it to nearly the speed of light and heating it to extreme temperatures, resulting in torrents of radiation that can be seen from Earth. The 2019 target was a mind boggling black hole at the core of M-87, a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo, a hole with the mass of 6.5 billion suns. “And it is teeming with activity, always burbling with turbulent energy and occasionally erupting into bright flares of emission.” “We are peering into a new environment, the curved spacetime near a supermassive black hole,” said Michael Johnson, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Three years after capturing the first image of a supermassive black hole in a galaxy 55 million light years away, astronomers have managed to “photograph” the gaping maw of the smaller but much closer black hole quietly lurking at the core of the Milky Way, researchers announced Thursday. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION The Event Horizon Telescope collaboration unveiled the first image of the super massive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, showing a ring of blazing, super-heated material just outside the shadow of its event horizon, the gravitational point of no return for anything falling in.
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