Subject #705: The Black Hole Portrait | The subject

This Thursday, the world saw for the first time images of Sagittarius A*, which is at the center of the Milky Way, the galaxy of the Solar System. The achievement is the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an initiative in which hundreds of scientists from more than a dozen institutions participate. From 8 points on Earth, they “observe the same target at the same time and then combine all the signals”, in a “big technological challenge”, explains Thaisa Storchi Bergmann, head of the research group in Astrophysics at the Federal University of Rio Grande. southern. In conversation with Renata Lo Prete, she says that the images of Sagittarius A* confirm conclusions of both the 2020 Nobel Prize winners in Physics and Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. “Supermassives appeared in the centers of galaxies”, teaches Thaisa. “And they formed together with them, at the beginning of the Universe.” The astrophysicist, responsible for an important discovery about black holes in the early 1990s, considers the photo to be a “success for everyone” who studies the subject. .

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