The first direct image of Sagittarius A* was released in 2022.
The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration unveiled the image on May 12, 2022. It showed a glowing, asymmetric ring of hot material surrounding the dark central shadow associated with the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s center. Sagittarius A*, commonly abbreviated Sgr A*, is about 26,000 light-years from Earth and has a mass roughly four million times that of the Sun.
The image was produced from radio-interferometry data collected in 2017 by linking eight observatories around Earth into a virtual planet-sized telescope. Because Sgr A* changes noticeably over minutes, processing and combining the observations took several years.
The key date is the public release, not the observation date. The data were gathered in 2017, while the result was announced in 2022. Another common mix-up is 2019, when the Event Horizon Telescope released the first image of a black hole, M87*—a different object in a different galaxy.