#FACTS ABOUT BLACKHOLE TV#

That makes it “wimpy” compared to other supermassive black holes, Wardle says. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, likely has around 100 million black holes, though we’ve only identified a few dozen of them.Īs for Sgr A*, it's about 26,000 light-years away from Earth with a mass four million times that of the sun. Less massive black holes are much more common. Supermassive ones lie at the center of most galaxies. It turns out that black holes are everywhere. And as matter falls in, the black hole gets more massive and the event horizon expands. Nothing that passes across the threshold of the event horizon can escape the black hole's gravitational pull. When gas, stars and other matter come close enough to the black hole, they are drawn toward the black hole’s event horizon, an imaginary shell around the singularity. Though it's unlikely, results from the EHT could even require adjustments to Einstein's general theory of relativity.īut before we get to whether one of the greatest scientists who ever lived didn't get it quite right, we have to start with the basics.īlack holes typically happen when a very massive star burns through its nuclear fuel and collapses cataclysmically into an incredibly dense point, or singularity. In fact, it is good enough to answer some of our biggest unanswered questions about one of the universe's most mysterious phenomena: What do light and matter look like as they fall toward a black hole? What are the streams of energy shooting out of black holes made of? What role did black holes play in the formation of galaxies? This may not seem like much but generating this rough of a picture of Sgr A* is the equivalent of reading a newspaper headline on the moon while standing on Earth. The circular dark region is a shadow cast by the strong gravity of the black hole. The bright regions are hot gas surrounding the black hole. Researchers are currently analyzing it.ĭepending on the results, the image they produce of Sgr A* may look like one of these:Ĭomputer simulations of the images EHT researchers hope to generate. The initiative, called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), finished collecting data in April 2017. Scientists don't doubt black holes exist, but without an image, they can't prove it for certain.įor the last four years, professor of astrophysics John Wardle has been working with a team of roughly 200 scientists and engineers to create an image of Sgr A* that would be our first ever picture of a black hole.

#FACTS ABOUT BLACKHOLE TV#

Those pictures you see on the web or in TV documentaries are illustrations or simulations based on indirect evidence - observations of the region of space around the black hole.

They're ubiquitous in our universe, but they're so small in the sky, we don't have a detailed image of any of them. This is actually true of all black holes. Sgr A* (pronounced Saj-A-star) is the largest black hole in our night sky, but we don't know what it looks like up close because we've never been able to take a picture of it. Every 10,000 years or so, it swallows a nearby star. For billions of years, surrounding gas and dust have been falling into it. At the center of our galaxy lies a swirling, energy-spewing supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* or Sgr A*, for short.

Facts about blackhole