Our own black hole
At the heart of the Milky Way galaxy lies a supermassive black hole, and last week scientists finally captured its image, reports The New York Times. Using an international network of telescopes known as the Event Horizon Telescope Project, astronomers compiled a fuzzy, doughnut-like image of Sagittarius A*, pronounced A-star. A* is as massive as 4.3 million of our suns, but with a diameter of just 14.6 million miles, it’s a tiny dot at the center of our galaxy—which is 100,000 light-years wide and 1,000 light-years thick. While the Event Horizon team had imaged a different black hole, from the M87 galaxy, in 2019, team member Feryal Özel of the University of Arizona said picturing A* was much harder. “We’re looking through everything that is between us and the center of the galaxy, whereas for M87, we’re looking out and away from the Milky Way,” she said. “We had to really understand this effect and subtract it from our images correctly.”