Scientists have learned a lot more about black holes ‘over the past five years’

ANU cosmologist and astrophysicist Dr Brad Tucker says scientists have learned a lot more about black holes “over the past five years”. It comes as the Event Horizon Telescope is set to reveal the first images of supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* - which is located at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way. “We have now new ways of measuring black holes, we can estimate the mass is about four million times the mass of our sun and this is by sure the gravitational effect,” he told Sky News Australia. “We do know some black holes in other galaxies can be billions of times the mass of our sun but we do have a slight question of how do they get that big.” Dr Tucker says there is a theory smaller black holes are swallowed up by larger ones in a “black hole eat black hole world” but it was not confirmed. “But we don’t really know a lot about what actually happens at that point,” he said. “Everything we usually see on the surrounding environment, not the black hole itself because they’re still relatively small and still very dense areas and because they’re hard to see because there’s no light shining on it.”