In 2019 the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration released the first image ever recorded of a black hole. (Image credit: EHT Collaboration) (opens in new tab) The Event Horizon Telescope, a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration, captured this image of the supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy M87 and its shadow. Related: How many black holes are there in the universe? Black hole images Not only does the black hole candidate reside in the constellation Monoceros ("the unicorn"), its incredibly low mass - about three times that of the sun - makes it nearly one of a kind. The closest black hole to Earth is dubbed " The Unicorn" and is situated approximately 1,500 light-years away. Though detecting black holes is a difficult task and estimates from NASA (opens in new tab) suggest there could be as many as 10 million to a billion stellar black holes in the Milky Way. Since the Milky Way contains over 100 billion stats, our home galaxy must harbor some 100 million black holes. (Image credit: NASA/UMass/D.Wang et al., IR: NASA/STScI) (opens in new tab)Īccording to the Space Telescope Science Institute (opens in new tab) (STScI) approximately one out of every thousand stars is massive enough to become a black hole. At the center of the Milky Way lies a supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*).
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