Sagittarius A* possesses 4 million times the mass of our sun and is located about 26,000 light years - the distance light travels in a year,9.5 trillion kilometres - from Earth.
Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects with gravity so strong that not even light can escape,making viewing them quite challenging. A black hole’s event horizon is the point of no return beyond which anything - stars,planets,gas,dust and all forms of electromagnetic radiation - gets dragged into oblivion.
Project scientists have looked for a ring of light - super-heated disrupted matter and radiation circling at tremendous speed at the edge of the event horizon - around a region of darkness representing the actual black hole. This is known as the black hole’s shadow or silhouette.
The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy thatcontains at least 100 billion stars. Viewed from above or below it resembles a spinning pinwheel,with our sun situated on one of the spiral arms and Sagittarius A* located at the centre.
The image released in 2019 of the supermassive black hole in a galaxy called Messier 87,or M87,showed a glowing ring of red,yellow and white surrounding a dark centre. The M87 black hole is far more distant and massive than Sagittarius A*,situated about 54 million light-years from Earth with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun.
The researchers said that Sagittarius A*,despite being much closer to our solar system than M87,was harder to capture.