Sagittarius A has an estimated mass of about four million Suns, and is 26,000 light-years away.

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Today we have seen for the first time a black hole at the center of our galaxy. The same international team of scientists that taught us for the first time in 2019 what one of these galactic monsters looked like – Galaxy Messier 87. one located in the center of (M87), 55 million light-years away, this Thursday presented the image obtained from the black hole of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, and with it, demonstrated its existence.

There was much anticipation about the announcement of this new scientific milestone, also made with the Event Horizon Telescope, which was projected to be “historic” and “revolutionary”. Already when the first picture of the black hole was shown, in April 2019, team leaders indicated that the next objective would be to ‘picture’ Sagittarius A. Three years later and in the midst of a pandemic, which has made the task difficult, we get this snapshot of what it was like to past black holes.

Sagittarius A has an estimated mass of about four million Suns, and is 26,000 light-years away.

The results have been declared this afternoon with simultaneous press conferences in different countries. In Spain, it is taking place at the headquarters of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC).

Rose MendezThe Chairman of CSIC has stated that this “Pictures and scientific evidence that changed our concept of the universe,

“Today we are going to see for the first time something really new, exciting and extraordinary at the center of our galaxy”, announced Xavier BarkensDirector General of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). Barkens reviews that, for decades, attempts have been made to study this object, and at times it has been close, and he recalls the 2020 Nobel Prize for “exactly this discovery”.

“These extraordinary results could not have been achieved in a single facility or in any one country,” he said, noting that an international team of 300 scientists worked on them. “It’s important to remember that in these times, when the world is not going in that direction,” Barkans said.

Spanish scientists play a major role in this international consortium that works with data from the Event Horizon Telescope. In fact, it is a network of eight telescopes distributed around the world that work together in a very specific period of time for this project, called very long base interferometry.
The CSIC President has highlighted international cooperation as the key to achieving these new results. “We all ask ourselves the same questions and together we will be able to answer them.”

antex alberdiCSIC’s director of the IAA and member of the EHT Scientific Collaboration regarded today’s presentation as a continuation of two recent and important discoveries: the detection of gravitational waves in 2016 and the first image of a black hole, acquired and announced in 2019. was done. In Spain, as Alberdi recalled, “in the same room” of the CSIC on Calle Serrano in Madrid.

In 2020, scientists Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Gage shared the Nobel Prize for Physics “for the discovery of a compact supermassive object at the center of our galaxy”. The objection is that, as far as we know, it could only be a black hole, Also it would be fantastic to be able to consider the real aspect of it.