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11/04/2005:

"Solved: the mysteries of the black hole"

...A hole in space seems to make no sense at all, yet scientists are convinced that these prisons of light are for real, even though they have never really been seen and the only evidence for their existence is circumstantial.

But astronomers have now got close to staring a black hole in the face. With the help of an array of 10 radio telescopes in America, they have pictured the void at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy 26 million light years away, where a supermassive black hole sits invisibly like the transparent eye of a hurricane.

This particular black hole is estimated to have a mass equivalent to four million Suns and yet the latest measurements, published in the journal Nature, suggest it occupies a volume with a radius less than the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

This is less than half the size previously estimated, indicating that astronomers are close to defining the crucial outer boundary of one of the most elusive phenomena in cosmology - one that has mystified scientists for decades. "We're getting tantalisingly close to being able to see an unmistakable signature that would provide the first concrete proof of a supermassive black hole at a galaxy's centre," said Zhi-Qiang Shen, of Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China, one of the leaders of the study.
independent.co.uk