Evidence They Exist

No one has directly "seen" a black hole, but the evidence is overwhelming. Stars near the center of our galaxy orbit an invisible object at tremendous speeds, revealing a mass of 4 million Suns packed into a region smaller than our solar system. That object is Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way's supermassive black hole.

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope captured the first image of a black hole's shadow — the supermassive black hole in galaxy M87, with a mass of 6.5 billion Suns. The image showed a bright ring of superheated gas swirling around a dark central void.