After discovering stars orbiting an invisible object, scientists discovered Sagittarius A*, the black hole of the Milky Way.
The object is about 27,000 light years from Earth precisely for this reason, to observe it, the team of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration has created a network of 8 telescopes, all over the world, connected to each other.
With this network of telescopes, scientists were able to observe and take pictures of the object.
While we can't see the black hole, due to the object's darkness, the glowing gas surrounding it exhibits a telltale signature: a dark central region, or shadow, surrounded by a glowing ring-like structure.
The image shows us light bent by the black hole's powerful gravity, which has a mass four million times greater than that of the Sun.
M87 and Sgr A * compared
The two black holes look very similar, even though the black hole in our galaxy (second photo) is more than a thousand times smaller and less massive than M87 * (first photo).
"We have two completely different types of galaxies here and two very different black hole masses, but near the edge these black holes look strikingly similar," says Sera Markoff, co-chair of the EHT Science Council. "This tells us that General Relativity rules these objects closely, and any differences we see further away must be due to differences in the material surrounding the black holes."
Scientists have begun to use the new data to test theories and models of how gas behaves around supermassive black holes. This process is not yet fully understood, but it is believed to play a key role in shaping the formation and evolution of galaxies.