The NAOJ is involved in operating the ALMA Observatory in Chile, which plays a central role in the project. The combined array created a virtual telescope with an aperture of about 10,000 kilometers, close to the Earth’s diameter.
The researchers used observational data on Sagittarius A* and the black hole called M87 collected in April 2017 from eight radio telescope observatories in Chile, Hawaii, Antarctica and three other locations across the globe. The latest achievement was the team’s second since April 2019, when it released the first image of a black hole from the Messier 87 galaxy, which is about 55 million light years from Earth. About 20 Japanese astronomers are participating in the project, which started around 2006. The team comprises more than 300 scientists from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and 12 other research institutions in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, an international research team working to shoot images of a black hole, announced on May 12 that it successfully provided the first visual evidence of Sagittarius A*, a black hole about 27,000 light years from Earth. Japanese astronomers are among an international research team that successfully captured the first image of a black hole at the center of the Milky Way, which could shed light on the formation of our galaxy.