The black hole is named Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”), and the reveal of its image received an international rollout this morning in simultaneous press conferences held by the National Science Foundation (NSF) at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and the European Southern Observatory headquarters in Garching, Germany. The image represents 3.5 million gigabytes of data taken at millimeter wavelengths by eight radio telescopes around the world. “It took several years to refine our image and confirm what we had,” said Feryal Özel, an astronomer at the University of Arizona in Tucson, at the NSF press conference. “But we prevailed.” The data that went into making the M87* and Sgr A* images were taken back in April 2017 during the EHT’s inaugural observing campaign. Despite its distance, M87’s central black hole appears roughly the same size on the sky as that of our own galaxy’s. Though M87* is about 2,000 times more distant, it is also about 1,500 times large...
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