Discovery
Article reserved for subscribers
Three years after the very first image of a black hole in history, an international collaboration unveiled an unprecedented snapshot of the center of our galaxy on Thursday. No terrestrial telescope being powerful enough, it was necessary to synchronize different observatories all around the planet.
Curiosity rooted in their bodies, men have always wanted to explore the ends of the world… and find out what’s in the middle of things. What is at the center of the Earth? A gigantic cavity containing a sea and extinct animals, imagined Jules Verne in 1864. What is the center of the universe? The Earth, it was thought since Antiquity. The Sun, replied Copernicus in 1543. Then we gradually understood that the universe has no center (because it has no edges). But what is there then at the center of our galaxy? Today, thanks to the international collaboration of hundreds of astronomers, we have an image to answer this fundamental question: there is a black hole, surrounded by a ring of incandescent gas.
Three years after revealing the very first black hole photo in history, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) consortium organized a new press conference on Thursday to unveil a second image. So similar and yet so different…
dark area
Different, because the target is no longer the same. After pointing their telescopes at the supermassive black hole that occupies the heart of the galaxy M87, located 50 million light-years from Earth, astronomers aimed for the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. It also contains, like almost all the galaxies of the…