Astronomers capture 'deepest and sharpest' images ever of supermassive black hole in the Milky Way

[Judi Lynn]

The images using a new technique at the European Southern Observatory in Chile revealed a previously unseen star

By Sally Guyoncourt
December 14, 2021 9:54 pm(Updated 9:55 pm)

Astronomers have obtained the “deepest and sharpest” images ever of the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.
Using the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at the European Southern Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert, they were able to acquire pictures of the region around the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy.

The VLTI is one of the world’s most advanced optical space observatories with four main telescopes and four auxiliary telescopes, which can detect stellar objects four billion times fainter than can be seen with the naked eye.

These new images have zoomed in 20 times more than was previously possible before using the VLTI and helped astronomers discover a never seen before star which is close to the black hole.

. . .

The new observations, combined with previous data, confirmed the stars follow paths exactly as predicted by General Relativity for objects moving around a black hole of mass 4.30 million times that of the Sun, the most precise estimate of the Milky Way’s central black hole mass to date.

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