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The infalling gas emits just a few hundred times as much energy as our Sun, so at a cosmically ‘close’ 27,000 lightyears, Sgr A* cannot be considered bright. Sgr A*’s appetite compared to M87* is surprisingly slow it is effectively starving, surviving on whispers of gas from the winds of nearby stars – comparable to a human swallowing one grain of rice every million years. This dark core is where the light, captured by immense gravity, has plunged past the event horizon never to be seen again, but leaving a ‘shadow’ of the black hole’s presence. There is a bright fuzzy ring of light – radio emission from electrons in the gas swishing around the black hole – encircling a dark centre. To solve this dilemma, scientists used some of the most sophisticated computer algorithms ever written to simulate different images, and then used these to test what results their various image reconstruction methods would give.Įventually they were certain they had detected a ring, and what a spectacular, ground-breaking result!ĮHT’s vision – three million times sharper than the human eye – revealed Sgr A* is strikingly similar in its overall morphology to M87*. The result was uncertain many images revealed a ring, but not all.

This takeover and vandalism of the Aperture Science image was very short-lived, with GLaDOS quickly taking control of the facility back and removing any and all of the damage done by Wheatley. It was a daunting task: collaboration members split into multiple teams, each using independent methods to reconstruct an image from the data. Centuries after the founding of Aperture Science, for only a day the logo was modified to be defaced with Wheatleys name when he took over the Aperture Science Enrichment Center. It has taken five years for the EHT team to figure it all out.

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The EHT Collaboration created a series of possible images of Sgr A* using ray-tracing based on Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. 'By comparison, M87* is a puppy napping on a sunlit patio.' How the Milky Way's black hole image was captured Trying to see Sgr A* was like standing in your garden in a rainstorm peering through a steamed-up kitchen window watching your frantic puppy – our supermassive black hole – careering around in circles chasing its tail. 'This created a screen of scattered radio waves. Moreover, we were looking through the entire Galactic plane stuffed with stars, gas and dust, all rapidly-changing over different timescales.' 'Observing Sgr A*’s turbulent gas flow, minute-by-minute, created ‘motion blur’.

'Gas circling Sgr A* and M87* moves at the same speed – almost the speed of light – but it circuits Sgr A* in a few minutes compared to M87*’s days,' says Younsi. …this means it dwarfs our own galaxy’s black hole which is a tiny spec in comparison at 32.2 million miles in diameter, or about one third of an AU, not far from the 29-million-mile orbit of Mercury The challenge of trying to 'see' a black hole