Astronomers reveal first image of black hole at the center of the Milky Way: "It's pretty amazing"

Three years after capturing the first image of a supermassive black hole in a galaxy 55 million light years away, astronomers have managed to "photograph" the gaping maw of the smaller but much closer black hole quietly lurking at the core of the Milky Way, researchers announced Thursday.

"We are peering into a new environment, the curved spacetime near a supermassive black hole," said Michael Johnson, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "And it is teeming with activity, always burbling with turbulent energy and occasionally erupting into bright flares of emission."

The 2019 target was a mind boggling black hole at the core of M-87, a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo, a hole with the mass of 6.5 billion suns. Its enormous gravity pulls surrounding material into a disc, accelerating it to nearly the speed of light and heating it to extreme temperatures, resulting in torrents of radiation that can be seen from Earth.