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The distance is like trying to see a grain of sand in Phoenix from Tucson, he said. That’s because it’s very far away and there’s a magnetic field between Earth and the black hole. and then we ran a lot of black hole simulations, and with these simulations we compared them with the observations and then we learned about the environment of the black hole,” Chan said.Įven with the strong telescope array, many of the black hole’s details were still unclear, Chan said. “We used almost all the supercomputers we could find in the U.S. In addition to operating two of the telescopes, UA researchers did much of the heavy lifting in terms of data processing, simulations and image reconstruction.Ĭhi-kwan Chan, an associate research professor at UA’s Steward Observatory, led the team that made computational models to predict what the black hole would look like and how it might behave. It’s four million times more massive than the sun, but it’s some 27,000 light-years from Earth, so it’s tiny when viewed by a telescope, proving a challenge for the project. Sagittarius A* is the name of the massive object at the center of the galaxy, which scientists had believed was a black hole, although this is the first direct visual evidence. She called the black hole a “gentle giant in the center of our galaxy.” “Until now, we didn’t have the direct picture confirming that Sagittarius A* was indeed a black hole,” she said at the event. Özel is a founding member of the collaboration and spoke about the Milky Way discovery alongside researchers from Harvard and the Smithsonian, Caltech and MIT. UA astronomer Feryal Özel displayed the orange and black doughnut-shaped picture at a National Science Foundation event Thursday morning in Washington, D.C., as other news conferences were held simultaneously around the world. Researchers in Tucson also performed years of data analysis to help produce the actual image. UA provided and operated two of the eight telescopes - one on Mount Graham in Arizona and one at the South Pole - that observed the black hole in 2017.