On May 12, 2022, scientists released the first image of the accretion disk surrounding Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, ever taken. This picture was taken by the Event Horizon Telescope, the worldwide network of radio observatories that also captured the event horizon of Messier 87 in 2019.

This image showed that the Milky Way does indeed have a supermassive black hole at its center. As Sagittarius A* is much smaller than Messier 87, producing an image of it represents a technological breakthrough in astronomical imaging.

In the video below, Professor Natarajan discusses the background of how this image was taken and how we came to believe a supermassive black hole lay at the center of our galaxy in the first place.