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. Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects with gravity so strong that not even light can escape, making viewing them extremely challenging. It is putting out only a few hundred times the energy of the sun despite being much more massive. 'If Sgr A* were a person, it would consume a single grain of rice every million years,' Johnson said. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astrophysicist Michael Johnson called Sagittarius A* 'ravenous but inefficient,' currently eating relatively little matter. Sagittarius A* (pronounced Sagittarius 'A' star) possesses 4 million times the mass of our sun and is located about 26,000 light-years - the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km) - from Earth.

University of Arizona astronomer Feryal Özel, at a news conference in Washington, hailed the first direct image of the gentle giant in the center of our galaxy,' showing a glowing ring of red, yellow and white surrounding a darker center. The feat was accomplished by the same Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) international collaboration that in 2019 unveiled the first photo of a black hole - that one residing at the heart of a different galaxy. The black hole - called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* - is the second one ever to be imaged.

Photo of black hole