Never-before-seen footage offers fresh evidence that a supermassive black hole lurks at the centre of the Milky Way.
Telescopes have captured plumes of hot gas circling the celestial object at 30 per cent the speed of light, or around 201 million mph (320 million kph).
The material is ‘as close as you can get to a black hole without being consumed by it’, scientists said.
Astronomers have long pondered whether the centre of our galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole – a mysterious region ten billion times larger than the sun.
Because the area absorbs all surrounding light, it is incredibly difficult to observe, and scientists have spent decades searching for any hint of black hole activity.
The new images mark the first time material has been spotted orbiting close to the point of no return, and the most detailed observations yet of material orbiting this close to a black hole, scientists say.
Researchers at the European Southern Observatory used specialist equipment to observe Sagittarius A*, the massive object at the heart of the Milky Way.
They spotted clumps of gas swirling around at about 30 per cent of the speed of light on a circular orbit just outside the region’s event horizon.
The speed of the gas was enough to trigger three powerful bursts of radiation from the clouds.
Researchers detected these flares from Earth using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) array in Chile.
Specialist equipment was used to take a close look at the infrared radiation coming from the accretion disc around Sagittarius A*.
‘Astronomers have observed material as close as you can get to a black hole without being consumed by it,’ Dr Josephine Peters, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford who wasn’t involved in the study, told Business Insider.
ESO’s exquisitely sensitive GRAVITY instrument has added further evidence to the long-standing assumption that a supermassive black hole lurks in the centre of the Milky Way
Researchers at the European Southern Observatory used specialist equipment to observe Sagittarius A* (pictured), the massive object at the heart of the Milky Way
‘Even though [Sagittarius A*] is our closest supermassive black hole, it is still incredibly mysterious.
‘This marks the beginning of understanding more about our nearby astronomical monster.’
The ESO said the observed flares provide long-awaited confirmation that the object in the centre of the galaxy is, as has long been assumed, a supermassive black hole.
WHAT ARE BLACK HOLES?
Black holes are so dense and their gravitational pull is so strong that no form of radiation can escape them – not even light.
They act as intense sources of gravity which hoover up dust and gas around them.
Their intense gravitational pull is thought to be what stars in galaxies orbit around.
How they are formed is still poorly understood.
Supermassive black holes are incredibly dense areas in the centre of galaxies with masses that can be billions of times that of the sun. They cause dips in space-time (artist’s impression) and even light cannot escape their gravitational pull
Astronomers believe they may form when a large cloud of gas up to 100,000 times bigger than the sun, collapses into a black hole.
Many of these black hole seeds then merge to form much larger supermassive black holes, which are found at the centre of every known massive galaxy.
Alternatively, a supermassive black hole seed could come from a giant star, about 100 times the sun’s mass, that ultimately forms into a black hole after it runs out of fuel and collapses.
When these giant stars die, they also go ‘supernova’, a huge explosion that expels the matter from the outer layers of the star into deep space.
This wide-field image shows the rich star clouds in the constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer) in the direction of the centre of our Milky Way galaxy
A supermassive black hole is a larger version of the black holes which form when the centres of giant stars collapse in upon themselves.
The flares originate from material orbiting very close to the black hole’s event horizon — making these the most detailed observations yet of material orbiting this close to a black hole.
Reinhard Genzel, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, who led the study, said: ‘This always was one of our dream projects but we did not dare to hope that it would become possible so soon.’
This chart shows the location of the field of view within which Sagittarius A* resides. The black hole is marked with a red circle within the constellation of Sagittarius (centre right)
Astronomers have long pondered whether the centre of the Milky Way (artist’s impression) hosts a supermassive black hole – a mysterious region ten billion times larger than the sun
WHAT IS THE VERY LARGE TELESCOPE?
The European Southern observatory (ESO) built the most powerful telescope ever made in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile and called it the Very Large Telescope (VLT).
The telescope is widely regarded as one of the most advanced optical instruments ever made and consists of four telescopes.
The main mirrors measures 27 feet (8.2 metres) in diameter and there are also four movable six feet (1.8 metre) diameter auxiliary telescopes.
The large telescopes are called Antu, Kueyen, Melipal and Yepun.
The European Southern observatory (ESO) built the most powerful telescope ever made in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile and called it the Very Large Telescope (VLT).
The first of the Unit Telescopes, ‘Antu’, went into routine scientific operations on April 1, 1999.
The telescopes can work together to form a giant ‘interferometer’.
This interferometer allows images to be filtered for any unnecessary obscuring objects and, as a result, astronomers can see details up to 25 times finer than with the individual telescopes.
It has been involved in spotting the first image of an extrasolar planet, tracking individual stars moving around the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way and observing the afterglow of the furthest known Gamma ray burst.