We had to come up with a clever technique. And since we can't really build a kind of Death Star telescope the size of the Earth. So in order to be able to make an image of it, we need a very large telescope. ISSAOUN: It's also 26,000 light years away from us at the center of our galaxy, so it looks really, really small as seen from Earth. ISSAOUN: Exactly because even though these supermassive black hole objects are enormous in size, Sagittarius A* is actually the size of the orbit of Mercury around the sun. And you aren't even using a regular telescope, right? Like, you've linked a bunch of telescopes all over the planet to make, essentially, the way I understand it, an Earth-sized telescope, right? And then it escapes and travels, you know, millions of light years to get to us and form this beautiful image that we see.ĬHANG: That is so cool. ISSAOUN: And what we're seeing around it, this bright ring of light, is actually light coming from very, very hot, glowing gas near the black hole that is about to fall into the black hole and is glowing radiation. So at the center of the photo, there's this kind of central darkness patch. And that is if black holes get their name because their gravitational pull is so strong that light cannot escape, what are you actually taking a picture of? - because don't you need light to take any photo? So taking a long exposure photo is really, really challenging and took the team a lot more time to deal with.ĬHANG: Can I also ask - because I need you to explain something I cannot quite wrap my head around. Means that the gas around it varies much quicker as we would see it from Earth. ISSAOUN: So our Milky Way black hole, Sagittarius A*, is kind of a problem child black hole in that it's quite small in size, which. So I know these images can be years in the making, right? Like, what was particularly challenging about coming up with this new image of Sagittarius A? I'm glad to be here.ĬHANG: And so glad to have you. She's an observational astronomer on the Event Horizon Telescope team.

It depicts beautiful swirls of magnetic fields spiraling out from the edges of this massive gravity monster. Now, astronomers have released an even more detailed portrait of Sagittarius A. Those images showed a fuzzy orange blob encircling a dark center, kind of like an orange donut. And in 2022, scientists gave us the first-ever look at that black hole. Sagittarius A is this supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

Instal the new Light of Alariya