Astronomers have captured the first image of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy.
What makes this milestone even more significant, is the fact that two Wits University scientists are part of the international team.
Known as Sagittarius A*, the object is a staggering four million times the mass of our Sun.
The image of the black hole was unveiled during a simultaneous global press conference, including at the Wits Planetarium on Thursday.
Wits professor of Astrophysics, Roger Deane, said that they had overwhelming evidence that this was indeed a black hole and it yielded valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the centre of most.
“The Wits Centre for Astrophysics is proud to be part of the global Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, which has unveiled this historic result,” Deane said.
Deane said that because the black hole was about 27,000 light-years away from Earth, it appears to us to have about the same size in the sky as a doughnut on the moon.
“As we showed in the Wits Planetarium, black hole imaging has strong synergy with the Meerkat and Square Kilometre Array sites and we are excited to enhance that through the expansion of the EHT array into Africa,” he said. (EWN)