One of the world’s most powerful telescopes has given astronomers the deepest and sharpest images of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole and they hope it will help them learn even more about the mysteries of dark space.
The European Southern Observatory has the world’s most advanced optical telescope and it is aptly named the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). It consists of four main telescopes and four auxiliary telescopes and can detect objects in space four billion times fainter than what can be seen through the naked eye.
The VLTI has helped astronomers capture never-before-seen images of the center of the Milky Way, known as the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. It’s estimated to be 27,000 light-years away.
Reinhard Genzel, director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, said in a statement that, “We want to learn more about the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*: How massive is it exactly? Does it rotate? Do stars around it behave exactly as we expect from Einstein’s general theory of relativity?”
Genzel said the best way to answer those questions is to closely study Sagittarius A*, and through the aid of VLTI, astronomers are able to do so with the highest precision than ever before.
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Julia Stadler, a researcher also at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, explained that, “The VLTI gives us this incredible spatial resolution and with the new images we reach deeper than ever before. We are stunned by their amount of detail, and by the action and number of stars they reveal around the black hole.”
Stadler said her team found a star called S300 which hadn’t been seen previously, proving just how powerful VLTI could be when it came to identifying faint objects close to the supermassive black hole.
Astronomers also went on a quest to make precise measurements of stars as they approached Sagittarius A* from March to July 2021. They found a record-holder star S29, which made its’ nearest approach to the black hole in late May 2021. It passed at a distance of just 13 billion kilometers, about 90 times the distance between the sun and Earth.
Astronomers say no other star has ever been observed to pass that close to or travel that fast around the black hole.
The observations were made possible thanks to GRAVITY, an instrument that was developed for VLTI, combining the light of all four of VLT’s telescopes using interferometry. It’s a complex technique that ends up creating images 20 times sharper than the individual VLTI could create on its own.
All of the new observations made with VLTI have confirmed to astronomers that stars follow paths exactly as predicted by the theory of general relativity for objects moving around a black hole of mass 4.3 million times that of the sun.
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