JOHANNESBURG, July 15 (Xinhua) -- The clearest radio image yet of the massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy has been captured by a super telescope in South Africa, local media reported.
The panorama, produced by the super radio telescope MeerKAT, features a black hole that measures 4 million times the mass of the sun and lies 25,000 light-years away from the earth.
The center of the Milky Way galaxy is known for being enshrouded by gas and dust and invisible from the earth using ordinary telescopes. It is also filled with unexplained phenomena.
"This image is remarkable," said Farhad Yusef-Zade, a leading expert on the puzzling filamentary structures at Northwestern University in the United States. The recent image has shown compact sources associated with the structures that might help solve the three-decade-old riddle, he said.
The MeerKAT telescope is a South African local project unveiled by the country's Deputy President David Mabuza on Friday. It consists of 64 dishes and boasts a total cost of 330 million U.S. dollars. Eventually it is meant to dovetail with Square Kilometer Array, a multinational radio telescope project that aims to comprise some 3,000 dishes.
