“This similarity reveals to us a key aspect of black holes no matter their size or the environment they live in. We have just seen the first image of a black hole, the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87 with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun. “If Sagittarius A* were the size of a doughnut, M87* would be the size of the Allianz Arena, the Munich football stadium just a few kilometers from where we are today,” Sara Issaoun, NASA Einstein fellow at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told a press conference at the European Southern Observatory in Germany. The team compared capturing it to “trying to take a clear picture of a puppy quickly chasing its tail.” To make the black hole visible, they developed sophisticated new tools to account for the gas movement. The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration observed the supermassive black hole at the center of M87, finding the dark central shadow in accordance with Gener. This is because the gas surrounding Sagittarius A* completes an orbit in just minutes compared with days to weeks for the gas orbiting the much larger M87*, causing the brightness and pattern of the gas to change rapidly. It was the first black hole to be imaged directly. That black hole has a mass equal to six and a half billion Suns but is only 38 billion km (24 billion miles) across. Despite being much closer to us, Sagittarius A* was significantly more difficult to capture than M87*. In 2017 the Event Horizon Telescope obtained an image of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy.
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