Milky Way's supermassive black hole captured by ESO in sharpest images ever

The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO's VLTI) marks another historic achievement as it captured the deepest and sharpest images of the region around the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. According to the astronomers, these images provide a view that is 20 times more zoomed-in than previous ones, and surprisingly, they also unveiled a previously undiscovered star near the black hole.

Astronomers observe the galactic center like never before

The Milky Way galaxy, which spans 1,00,000 light-years, has a supermassive black hole sitting at its center which is around 27,000 light-years from the Earth. However, the distance is no longer is a barrier at the VLTI has obtained the clearest pictures which entailed the discovery of a new star and the most precise measurement of Sagittarius A*'s mass. According to the latest estimates, the supermassive black hole at our galactic center has a mass that is 4.30 million times that of the Sun. In addition to this, astronomers also discovered the star called S300, thanks to the extremely detailed images, and another star near it which swooshed past the black hole at the closest distance and at the fastest pace. 

Among a cluster of five major stars, it was S29 that was observed making a pass near the black hole just 13 billion kilometres away at a speed of 8,740 kilometres per second. The scientists noted that no star has even crossed the black hole at such a close distance and at such stunning speed. Reinhard Genzel, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), said that studying the stars on orbits close to the black hole is the key to learning more about the black hole and determining how massive it actually is. "Following stars on close orbits around Sagittarius A* allows us to precisely probe the gravitational field around the closest massive black hole to Earth, to test General Relativity, and to determine the properties of the black hole", he stated as per ESO's report. 

The research team explained that the discovery was made using a unique instrument named GRAVITY. This instrument works on a technique called 'interferometry' where it combines the light of all four 8.2-meter telescopes of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and produces images 20 times better than those from the individual VLT telescopes. 

Image: Twitter/@ESO