美国国家公共电台 NPR--The black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy is captured in an image

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The black hole in the center of the Milky¹ Way galaxy² is captured in an image

Transcript³

An image of what looks like a glowing orange donut is actually the first picture of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, our home galaxy.

A MARTINEZ, HOST:

On social media lately, have you seen that picture, what looks like a fuzzy, orange doughnut? It's an image that astronomers⁴ are celebrating over. It's the massive supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce has more.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE⁵: Astronomers have long known that something weird⁶ lurks⁷ at the heart of the Milky Way. There, the stars whiz about, apparently⁸ influenced by the gravity of some giant, a mystery object 4 million times more massive than our sun. It seemed like a black hole. And scientists now have an image that proves it.

KATIE BOUMAN: I think it's just super exciting. I mean, what's more cool than seeing the black hole in the center of our own Milky Way?

GREENFIELDBOYCE: Katie Bouman of Caltech is part of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration⁹, a team of hundreds of scientists around the world working with radio telescopes to peer at the center of our galaxy. What they got was a picture showing a blurry¹⁰, orange ring. There's hot gases swirling¹¹ around a darkness that contains the unseeable black hole, which, of course, swallows everything around it, including light. But it looks like this black hole is a slow eater. Michael Johnson works at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard-Smithsonian. He says, if this black hole was a person...

MICHAEL JOHNSON: It would consume a single grain of rice every million years.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: One researcher who spent decades studying this black hole is Feryal Ozel of the University of Arizona. At a press conference, she said it had always felt sort of like having a remote virtual friend.

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FERYAL OZEL: I kind of had a idea in my head about what it looked like. We were online chatting. And then I was like - oh, you're real, huh? - meeting in person. So it's a very nice feeling.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: A few years ago, this team captured a similar image of a different black hole. That one was much more massive and in a distant galaxy. The researchers say they now want to switch from taking just still images to making movies of black holes in action.

Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.