Moreover, the Milky Way galactic center is thick with dust that obscures much of what is contained therein. In fact, if Sgr A* were a person, it would only consume the equivalent of a grain of rice every million years. Sagittarius A* may be closer… but it's nowhere near as active. That's what we see in the picture of M87*, with the shadow of the black hole in the center of the glowing material. The insane friction and gravity involved heat up this material, so that it glows brightly. That means it's feeding – surrounded by an enormous disk of dust and gas that is getting pulled into the black hole. M87* is what we refer to as an active galactic nucleus. They're so dense that, past a certain point known as the event horizon, not even light, the fastest known thing in the Universe, is able to achieve escape velocity from their gravitational pull. Black holes give off no radiation we can detect. (EHT collaboration, acknowledgment: Lia Medeiros, xkcd)Īttempting to image a black hole is attempting to image the invisible. But the two black holes presented very different challenges. Sgr A* is considerably closer to us, at a distance of around 25,800 light-years. The achievement comes three years after the collaboration released the first image of a black hole's shadow ever obtained – a supermassive black hole named M87*, clocking in at 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun, at the center of a galaxy 55 million light-years away. 'These unprecedented observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very center of our galaxy, and offer new insights on how these giant black holes interact with their surroundings.'

'We were stunned by how well the size of the ring agreed with predictions from Einstein's theory of general relativity,' said EHT Project Scientist Geoffrey Bower of Academia Sinica in Taipei. That image at the top of the screen – looking like a glorious blurry orange donut – is the dust around and shadow of Sgr A* itself, seen by humanity for the very first time, thanks to the hard work of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration. We've been able to infer its presence, and measure it, based on the movements of objects around it, but never had we seen the object itself. Contained in that dark heart, around which the entire galaxy revolves, is a supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A*, clocking in at roughly 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun.

Real black hole picture