The Heart of the Galaxy
Our galaxy’s heart holds a black hole four million times the Sun’s mass. In 2022 we saw its shadow for the first time.
What’s going on
For decades astronomers tracked stars racing around an invisible point at the centre of the Milky Way; their orbits revealed about four million Suns’ worth of mass packed into a tiny space. In 2022 the Event Horizon Telescope, radio dishes around the world working as one Earth-sized telescope, released the first image of this black hole, Sagittarius A*: a glowing ring of hot gas around a dark centre, about 27,000 light-years away.
Myth
Black holes suck in everything around them like vacuum cleaners.
Fact
From a safe distance, a black hole pulls like any other object of the same mass.
Learn more
Event Horizon Telescope, press release, 12 May 2022 (eventhorizontelescope.org); Nobel Prize in Physics 2020, nobelprize.org.
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