Stars can be seen whipping around the Milky Way’s central black hole in a matter of months in these images from the Very Large Telescope Interferometer at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. Even before Sagittarius A* and its accretion disk had been directly imaged, these images allowed researchers to pinpoint its mass and distance: 4.30 million times the mass of the Sun and 27,000 light-years away.
ESO/GRAVITY COLLABORATION