It was just a few short years ago that scientists showed us the first fully realized image of a black hole, one from the unimaginably distant galaxy M87.
Now we have a picture of a much, much closer black hole—that at the center of our own galaxy:
For the first time, astronomers have captured an image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.
It's the first direct observation confirming the presence of the black hole, known as Sagittarius A*, as the beating heart of the Milky Way.
It's an incredible thing, unimaginable in its power yet strikingly beautiful in its chaotic form:
This accomplishment—like that of M87 before it—was no small feat, and it offers no small amount of scientific dividends:
"We now see that the black hole is swallowing the nearby gas and light, pulling them into a bottomless pit," Ramesh Narayan, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, said in a statement. "This image confirms decades of theoretical work to understand how black holes eat."
The discovery was made possible by more than 300 researchers from 80 institutions working with a network of eight different radio telescopes around the globe that make up the Event Horizon Telescope.
It's a win for science, and it's also a win for those of us who like to geek out over deep space photography!
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