The Event Horizon Telescope revealed the first image of Sagittarius A* in 2022.
The announcement was made on 12 May 2022 by an international collaboration of observatories operating as a planet-sized virtual telescope. Sagittarius A*, often shortened to Sgr A*, is the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, about 26,000 light-years from Earth.
The image shows a bright, uneven ring of hot gas and a dark central shadow. Unlike the earlier M87* image released in 2019, Sgr A* changes visibly over minutes because its surrounding material orbits much faster. This rapid variability made the reconstruction especially difficult, since researchers had to combine observations of a moving target.
The year 2022 refers to the public image announcement, not the discovery of the black hole itself. Astronomers had inferred Sgr A* from decades of tracking stars orbiting an unseen, extremely massive object at the galactic center.