Behind the Amazing Photo of the Milky Way Galaxy's Very Own Black Hole

tech.hindustantimes.com:

One reason scientists are so fascinated with black holes is that they grab hold of the fabric of time and space, slowing time to a crawl as matter swirls toward a point of no return. The fact that black holes play tricks with time was what captured the imagination of Lia Medeiros, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, and part of the team that used an array of eight telescopes to create the first image of matter swirling around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

She was still a high school student when she first read that black holes distort time — and decided to find a way to make studying them her life's work. Not only does time slow down near a supermassive black hole, but theoretically, inside it, time and space would somehow switch places. Efforts to understand black holes could lead scientists to a more encompassing understanding of the rest of our universe, and of its still-mysterious origin.

The ambitious black hole imaging project is called the Event Horizon Telescope because it's meant to peer as closely as possible at the boundary beyond which even light can't escape the black hole's gravitational pull. Eight telescopes positioned around the world work together to create each image. In 2019, the same team unveiled a similar bright doughnut of matter swirling around a much bigger but more distant supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy called M87.

While both images took years of work and a team of more than 300 scientists, our own galaxy's black hole presented a bigger challenge. While the black hole itself has a mass equivalent to 4 million suns, the glowing donut in the image spans a relatively tiny region of space, smaller than the size of Mercury's