Updated

Updated · spacedaily.com · Jun 14

Event Horizon Telescope Unveils First Sagittarius A* Image, Confirming 51.8-Microarcsecond Ring

Updated

Updated · spacedaily.com · Jun 14

Event Horizon Telescope Unveils First Sagittarius A* Image, Confirming 51.8-Microarcsecond Ring

Q: Four years after its first photo, has science delivered the promised 'movie' of our galaxy's central black hole?

No. Four years after the 2022 release of the first image of Sagittarius A*, astronomers have not yet produced a full time-resolved “movie” of the Milky Way’s central black hole. What science has delivered is a stronger foundation for one. The 2022 image itself was a major technical achievement because Sgr A* changes on timescales of minutes, unlike M87*, whose structure evolves much more slowly. That rapid variability forced the Event Horizon Telescope team to abandon the usual assumption of a static target and reconstruct an average image from many changing snapshots. Since then, researchers have improved analysis methods and continued observations aimed at capturing that motion directly. The collaboration has repeatedly described movies of plasma orbiting Sgr A* as the next goal, not a completed result. Recent research published in 2026 still refers to “future movies of Sgr A*” using the current EHT, the next-generation EHT, and proposed missions such as the Black Hole Explorer. That means the promise has not yet been fulfilled, but it has not been abandoned either. The science has advanced toward dynamic imaging, with better telescope coverage, polarization studies, and new modeling tools designed for rapidly varying black holes. For now, though, the public milestone remains a still image—an average portrait of a restless object—rather than a true cinematic sequence.

3 articles · Updated · spacedaily.com · Jun 14

Eight linked radio observatories produced the first image of Sagittarius A*, revealing a bright ring around a dark shadow from the Milky Way’s central black hole, about 4 million solar masses and 27,000 light-years away.
Five years of analysis were needed after the April 2017 observations because gas around Sgr A* circles in minutes, not days, causing the source to flicker and forcing researchers to average over many possible images.
The ring’s measured diameter of about 51.8 microarcseconds closely matched general relativity’s prediction, giving scientists a second black-hole image—after M87* in 2019—that fits Einstein’s theory despite vastly different scales.
That nearby, rapidly changing target now gives the collaboration a resolved laboratory for stricter gravity tests and the next goal of making movies of plasma moving around the black hole.