The first photograph of a black hole at the centre of the Milky Way showed

On Thursday, an international team of scientists released the first photograph of Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy.

The image, created by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, is the first direct visual confirmation of the existence of this unseen entity, and comes three years after the first photograph of a black hole from a faraway galaxy.

“We’ve known about a compact object at the centre of our galaxy that’s four million times more massive than our Sun for decades,” Harvard University astronomer Sara Issaoun said at a news conference in Garching, Germany, organised in conjunction with other media events across the world.

“We now have direct evidence that this item is a black hole right now.”