First Image of the Center of Milky Way Galaxy
This is how the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* looks like
At some point in your life, you must have gazed at the night sky and chances are that your vision included the beautiful white haze of the Milky Way. Somewhere around that haze lies the center of the galaxy we live in. When I was a kid I used to look up at the sky and wonder about the pursuits of science and the extent of our ignorance in terms of the beauty and wonders of the universe. Over the years I’ve received many answers to such questions. I witnessed the amazing group of the galaxy and galactic clusters captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, I witnessed the evidence of the ripples produced in the space-time continuum formed due to the collision of two supermassive black holes, and many more. There are still some questions I’m seeking answers to. Today marks one remarkable day when another important question is answered.
What does the center of our galaxy look like? Black holes are the fate of dying stars. They are considered to be the densest objects in space. The prediction of the existence of black holes came from the solutions of Einstein’s field equations. Over the decades, scientists and thinkers from all around the world have been trying to find out what a black hole exactly looks like and we finally got the answer in 2019 when the first image of the black hole was released. The amazement had no limit when people witnessed how beautifully the image stayed consistent with the theoretical predictions of the black hole. The image of M97 captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) with the hard work of hundreds of astronomers from all around the world, and millions of dollars of investment, captivated everyone on the planet.
Today is another leap for mankind as we have to know what the center of the milky way galaxy looks like. The supermassive black hole around which more than 100 billion stars of the galaxy revolve and billions of such stellar systems move has finally shown its face. The Sagittarius A* located at the very center of our galaxy approximately 26000 light years from Earth, is the supermassive black hole that was releveled in the form of a compact image today. Technically, the image is of the shadow of the supermassive black hole.
The 2020 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez, the astrophysicists who first came up with the idea that the center of our galaxy has to be an extremely dense and compact object, like a black hole. The prediction was theoretically and observationally proven but we didn’t know what it looks like. Today, at conferences conducted in different parts of the world, the image is released and it looks stunning, confirming the works of Prof. Genzel and Prof. Ghez. The name Sagittarius A* was provided by the American astronomers Bruce Balick and Robert Brown in 1974 who first observed the heart of our galaxy using their radio telescope.
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