Telescopes picture giant black hole

Astronomers have taken their closest ever look at the giant black hole at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

The hole, which produces a radio emission source known as Sagittarius A, is thought to contain as much mass as four million Suns and have a diameter of 20 million miles.

Telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona and California combined resources to picture the region just beyond the point where nothing can escape the black hole's powerful gravity.

At this point, on the edge of the "event horizon", debris and dust swirls around radiating large amounts of energy.

Working together, the telescopes acted as if they were one giant observatory.

The results, featured in the journal Nature, revealed a structure around 30 million miles across at the galactic centre.

It had a resolution equivalent to seeing a baseball on the surface of the moon from a distance of 240,000 miles - one of the highest ever achieved in astronomy.

Despite the powerful imaging, the shape of the emitting region could only be vaguely determined.

Future study will help the astronomers establish whether they are looking at a glowing corona around the black hole, an orbiting "hot spot" or a jet of material.

Dr Jonathan Weintroub, one of the scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, said: "No-one has seen such a fine-grained view of the galactic centre before. We've observed nearly to the scale of the black hole event horizon - the region inside of which nothing, not even light, can ever escape."

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