Some distance away from the Earth—just a few unthinkable spans of quadrillions upon quadrillions of miles—is the galaxy's central supermassive black hole, a massive gravity well known as Sagittarius A* (pronounced "A-Star").
Astronomers have been imaging the gravitational effects of this black hole for years, and now the world's most powerful ground-based telescope array is sending back images at insane levels of detail:
The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO's VLTI) has obtained the deepest and sharpest images to date of the region around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The new images zoom in 20 times more than what was possible before the VLTI and have helped astronomers find a never-before-seen star close to the black hole. By tracking the orbits of stars at the center of the Milky Way, the team has made the most precise measurement yet of the black hole's mass.
An animated sequence of the images shows the dance of the stars around the black hole:
