Seeing the Darkness

Astronomers revealed the first image of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy on May 12. The image shows a glowing ring around the black hole. The ring is starlight bent by the black hole's powerful gravity. The black hole itself forms a dark "shadow" at the center of the ring. The black hole is about four million times the mass of the Sun. It's about 27,000 light-years away, in the constellation Sagittarius, and it's known as Sagittarius A* (A-star). It's a tiny target in our sky (about the size of a doughnut at the distance of the Moon) that it took years of observations with telescopes around the world to produce the image. [EHT Collaboration]