If you've never seen a gigantic electric-orange donut made of neatly ordered spiraling magnetic fields, spinning around the edges of a supermassive black hole in the Milky Way galaxy, this is your lucky click of the day. The mega-monster black hole, called Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), is just 26,700 light-years away — and its astonishing mass is about 4.3 million times greater than our Sun. In a milestone discovery that promises to rock the entire astronomical study of black holes, scientists just served up the first images ever seen of a mesmerizing portal right at the heart of our home galaxy.
There are two things even freakier than seeing vibrating magnetic fields of plasma-light around our galaxy's black hole. First, we've known about Sgr A*'s parabolic space-donut since 2022, but had no idea it was literally just vibing (magnetically speaking). And second, Sgr A* isn't even the fattest hole we've seen. In fact, the reason Sgr A*'s magnetic spiral-field is shaking up the astrophysics world is because it looks just like the one scientists found around an even bigger black hole in 2021 about 55 million light-years away, called M87.
