We took a photo of something light cannot escape from.
We took a photo of something light cannot escape from. Right at the heart of the Milky Way sits a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A*. It contains about four million times the mass of our Sun, compressed into a single point. Its gravity is so extreme that once anything crosses the event horizon, not even light gets out. And yet in 2022, a global network of radio telescopes captured its shadow — the dark silhouette where light bends and vanishes around it. That image is one of the most extraordinary things humanity has ever managed. We can't see Sagittarius A* directly, but we traced the outline of its absence. Almost every large galaxy is thought to carry one of these at its core. Ours just happens to be close enough to photograph. Follow Deep Field Vault for more of the universe, one true fact at a time.