The Event Horizon Telescope project, which captured the first-ever image of a black hole, has captured an image of the black hole at the center of our galaxy.
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, which famously captured the first-ever image of a black hole in 2019, has done it again — this time capturing an image of a black hole within our own galaxy. They have released an image of the enormous supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, called Sagittarius A* or Sgr A* (pronounced “sadge-ay-star”). This monster black hole has a mass 4.3 million times the mass of the sun — though that makes it considerably smaller than the black hole previously imaged at the heart of Messier 87, which is an almost incomprehensible 2.4 billion times the mass of the sun. Imaging a black hole is no easy task as these objects are so dense that they absorb anything that comes near them, even light. But that doesn’t mean that they are invisible, as the gas which comes close to them but has not yet been sucked into them glows brightly. It is this glowing gas that the EHT astronomers searched for, which forms a ring with a distinctive dark shadow region in the center which represents the black hole itself.
