Shadow of Milky Way’s giant black hole seen for the first time

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By Daniel Clery, Science Magazine.  

Excerpt: After 5 years, astronomers release picture of Sagittarius A*’s event horizon, ringed by bright gas. Astronomers today released the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy—or at least a picture of its shadow. Eight radio observatories around the globe and more than 300 scientists joined forces to image the object known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), a feat thought impossible until just a few years ago. ...The team, known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), in 2019 produced the first ever image of a black hole, at the center of the nearby giant galaxy M87. The M87 black hole is 1600 times more massive than Sgr A*. Yet the similarity of the two images—bright rings of gas trapped in death spirals around these ultimate sinkholes—shows how Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity, works the same at all scales.… See also Washington Post article Supermassive black hole seen at the center of our galaxy by Joel Achenbach, and Smithsonian Magazine article Here’s What the Black Hole in the Center of the Milky Way Looks Like.

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