We took a picture of something light cannot escape from.
We took a picture of something light cannot escape from. That sentence should not be possible — and yet, in 2022, astronomers released the first image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole sitting at the centre of the Milky Way. It contains roughly four million times the mass of our Sun, packed into a region of space where gravity becomes so extreme that even light, travelling at three hundred thousand kilometres per second, crosses a threshold and never returns. What the image actually captures is the shadow — the dark absence where light has been swallowed — ringed by superheated matter glowing around the edge. And this isn't some distant oddity. It lives at the heart of the galaxy you're inside right now. Almost every large galaxy is thought to carry one of these at its core. Follow Deep Field Vault for more of the universe.