New Image Shows Black Hole in the Center of the Milky Way

By: Oliver Kremer

On May 12th, 2022, the first-ever picture of the black hole Sagittarius A*, which is at the center of the Milky Way, was taken by a team of scientists. This was also the second picture ever taken of a black hole.

This one image took a team of 300 researchers over five years. Because Sagittarius A* is so far away from Earth, it required a network of 8 different radio telescopes (called the Event Horizon Project) that, when used together, create an Earth-sized telescope. According to Ramesh Narayan, an astrophysicist, and Harvard and Smithsonian, "We now see that the black hole is swallowing the nearby gas and light, pulling them into a bottomless pit," and "This image confirms decades of theoretical work to understand how black holes eat." This discovery has also shown researchers how black holes interact with other things and also what the center of our galaxy is like. The image also detailed how fast the gas around the black hole was moving, which also revealed the size of the black hole.

Sagittarius A* was found to be about 1,500 times smaller than the first black hole to be in an image which was M87 which resides 55 million light-years away.

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology stated that “Taking the Sagittarius A* image was like capturing a photo of a grain of salt in New York City using a camera in Los Angeles,” to detail just how hard it was to take this one picture.

Find out more about Sagittarius A* on CNN and The Astrophysical Journal Letters.