There's a monster at the heart of our galaxy.
There's a monster at the heart of our galaxy. Right at the core of the Milky Way sits a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A*, and it has roughly four million times the mass of our Sun packed into a single point. Its gravity is so extreme that once anything crosses the event horizon — light included — nothing comes back out. For decades we knew it was there, but we'd never actually seen it. Then in 2022, a global network of radio telescopes worked together and captured the first image of its shadow: a dark absence ringed by glowing gas. Not an artist's impression. A real photograph. Nearly every large galaxy in the universe is thought to carry one of these at its centre, including ours. Follow Deep Field Vault for more of the universe served straight.