Image reveals the black hole at our galaxy's center for the first time

Xavier Barcons, director general of the European Southern Observatory, said at a press conference that the groundbreaking result is a timely reminder of what we can achieve when countries work together.Sara Issaoun of Harvard, an EHT collaborator, said that researchers gathered direct evidence that Sagittarius A* is a black hole, with a size of about 52 microarcseconds in the sky."This appears the same size in the sky as a donut on the Moon," she said at a press conference.In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope captured the first-ever image of a supermassive black hole located 53.5 million light-years away. To achieve the photographic feat, the researchers linked telescopes across the planet to focus on the same object all together, creating a virtual observatory the size of Earth.For many EHT scientists, the next step was obvious: turn this groundbreaking cosmic lens to the heart of the Milky Way."We were all amazed that the image of Sagittarius A* looked so similar to the image of the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy," Sera Markoff, co-chair of the EHT Science Council and astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam, told reporters on Thursday.