Black holes gobble up galactic material but Ozel said this one is "eating very little." It's the equivalent to a person eating a single grain of rice over millions of years, another astronomer said.
Scientists had expected the Milky Way's black hole to be more violent, but "it turned out to be a gentler, more cooperative black hole than we had simulated," Ozel said. "We love our black hole."
"It is the cowardly lion of black holes," said project scientist Geoffrey C. Bower of Taiwan's Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Because the black hole "is on a starvation diet" so little material is falling into the centre, and that allows astronomers to gaze deeper, Bower said.
The Milky Way black hole is called Sagittarius A(asterisk), near the border of Sagittarius and Scorpius constellations. It is 4 million times more massive than our sun.
This is not the first black hole image. The same group released the first one in 2019 and it was from a galaxy 53 million light-years away that is 1500 times bigger than the one in our galaxy. The Milky Way black hole is much closer, about 27,000 light-years away. A light year is 9.5 trillion kilometres.
To get the picture the eight telescopes had to coordinate so closely "in a process similar to everyone shaking hands with everyone else in the room," said astronomer Vincent Fish of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The project cost nearly $60 million with $28 million coming from the US National Science Foundation.
"What's more cool than seeing the black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way," said California Institute of Technology's Katherine Bouman.
- AP