The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a collection of radio telescopes and a research collaboration of 300 scientists and 13 institutions. Like the birth of a newborn baby, on Thursday scientists proudly displayed the EHT’s new image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, Sagittarius, 27,000 light years from Earth.

The first cosmic “noise,” or radio waves detected from Sagittarius, was called Sagittarius A* in 1932 by Karl Jansky, a Bell Telephone Labs engineer. 
The black hole’s mass is greater than four million solar masses. Or to be more clear, its mass was greater than four million Suns. What we “see” and “hear” is in the past.

Dr. Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and Dr. Andrea Ghez of the University of California, Los Angeles won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020 for their work studying Sagittarius A*, which led to their theory about the black hole’s mass.

The new image was released in press conferences all over the world Thursday, and on social media, like a birth announcement from proud parents. 
Gasps of wonder and awe were heard at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Dr. Feryal Ozel of the University of Arizona displayed the image, and said it is,“the first direct image of the gentle giant in the center of our galaxy. It seems that black holes like doughnuts.”

Dr. Ozel’s reference to doughnuts, or donuts, has to do with the doughnut-shaped gas cloud, called a torus, that surrounds, and which gets sucked in by, the black hole.

The picture of the black hole and its torus confirmed what astronomers have predicted it would look like, after analyzing the motions of stars and gas clouds around the Milky Way’s center.

Dr. Ozel’s team’s findings were published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Even though black holes suck up everything around them and even light cannot escape them, they appear luminous and can be seen across the universe. When first observed in the 1960s, they were called quasars. This first discovery led to the speculation about black holes.

In 1967, physicist James Bardeen imagined that the Sagittarius black hole, if it existed, would be a shadowy dark circle in a mist of radio waves. For years, astronomers have been trying to make the telescopic image clearer, but “noise” in space interferes, and all that can be seen is a blurry image of our galaxy’s past. 

Scientists needed a bigger telescope that could “fine tune” the image by penetrating and seeing through the “noise.” 

In 2009, Dr. Sheperd Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and his team formed the Event Horizon Telescope. It uses eleven radio telescopes all over the globe.

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Since the black hole is always spinning, the radio image is always changing, presenting a challenge to obtain a clear image. 

Dr. Doeleman hopes to expand the telescope network and eventually have the technology to create a Sagittarius black hole “movie.” 

Coming to a theater near you.