^{Image Credit: EHT Collaboration.}

^{By Dr. Inés Urdaneta / Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), the largest scientific initiative, has given the world the closets look and confirmation of Sagittarius A*, the black hole in the center of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. It is just 26,000 light years away from Earth!

In our RSF scientific blog we had been following the EHT initiative. EHT is an international collaboration that aims to obtain the first image of the event horizon of a black hole, using a virtual telescope the size of the earth.  Different telescopes scattered across the planet collect the data of the same object, which is then combined and processed by a supercomputer to produce a final image through the interferometry technique, just as the one used in ALMA, but this time at a global scale.  By triangulating the data from the nine telescope arrays – (ARO/SMT), (APEX), (IRAM), (JCMT), (LMT)...

^{By Dr. Inés Urdaneta / Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

For some time now we have been following the Event Horizon Telescope initiative (EHT) aiming at the obtention of the first image of the EH of a Black Hole (BH) for Sagittarius A (Sag. A*), located at the center of our own galaxy, the milky way. Given the fact that Sag. A* nuclei is much less active that Messier 87 (M87*), the image reported first is that of M87*. Even though M87* is 2000 times farther away, it is 2000 times more massive. This compensates exactly the distance, with a higher nuclei activity allowing a better resolution and faster data analysis than Sag. A*.

So finally, the day has come! The moment couldn't be more exciting. First EHT results for the shadow of the BH, which is 55 million light years away from Earth, with a mass 6.5 billion times the mass of our Sun and located at the center of M87*, have been announced worldwide today, April 10th 2019, at the same time by different press...