First Picture Of Milky Way Monster
Science Advertisement Black hole: First picture of Milky Way monster Jonathan Amos Science correspondent @BBCAmos on Twitter Published 12 May Media caption, Ziri Younsi: "We affectionately term it a doughnut in the collaboration" This is the gargantuan black hole that lives at the centre of our galaxy, pictured for the very first time. Known as Sagittarius A*, the object is a staggering four million times the mass of our Sun. What you see is a central dark region where the hole resides, circled by the light coming from super-heated gas accelerated by immense gravitational forces. For scale, the ring has diameter of about 60 million km (40 million miles). To put that in context, Mercury, the innermost planet in our Solar System, orbits between roughly 40 million km and 70 million km from the Sun (or between 25 million miles and 45 million miles). Advertisement Fortunately, this monster is a long, long way away - some 26,000 light-years in the distance - so there's ...