Seeing the Darkness

the first image of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy

Astronomers revealed the first image of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy on May 12. The image shows a glowing ring around the black hole. The ring is starlight bent by the black hole's powerful gravity. The black hole itself forms a dark "shadow" at the center of the ring. The black hole is about four million times the mass of the Sun. It's about 27,000 light-years away, in the constellation Sagittarius, and it's known as Sagittarius A* (A-star). It's a tiny target in our sky (about the size of a doughnut at the distance of the Moon) that it took years of observations with telescopes around the world to produce the image. [EHT Collaboration]

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