Once you arrive at the edge of a black hole, gravity takes over. Pictured, the dark central region is not the event horizon, but rather the black holes shadow - the central region of emitting gas darkened by the central black holes gravity. In April 2019, astronomers announced to the world that they had done the unthinkable: they had managed to photograph - for the very first time - a black hole. “This similarity reveals to us a key aspect of black holes no matter their size or the environment they live in. This first image resolves the area around the black hole at the center of galaxy M87 on a scale below that expected for its event horizon. “If Sagittarius A* were the size of a doughnut, M87* would be the size of the Allianz Arena, the Munich football stadium just a few kilometers from where we are today,” Sara Issaoun, NASA Einstein fellow at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told a press conference at the European Southern Observatory in Germany. The team compared capturing it to “trying to take a clear picture of a puppy quickly chasing its tail.” To make the black hole visible, they developed sophisticated new tools to account for the gas movement.
This is because the gas surrounding Sagittarius A* completes an orbit in just minutes compared with days to weeks for the gas orbiting the much larger M87*, causing the brightness and pattern of the gas to change rapidly. Despite being much closer to us, Sagittarius A* was significantly more difficult to capture than M87*.
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