How do you take a picture of something defined by the fact that light cannot escape it? This episode follows the long road to imaging Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. We start with Karl Jansky’s accidental 1933 detection of radio static from the direction of Sagittarius while investigating interference for Bell Labs, then move through the 1974 interferometer work of Bruce Balick and Robert Brown, the origin of the asterisk in the name, and the 1994 velocity measurements that pointed to millions of solar masses packed into a tiny volume.

We then explain how the Event Horizon Telescope used aperture synthesis to link dishes across the planet, why the 2022 image of our own black hole took years longer to produce than the 2019 image of M87*, and what the S-stars orbiting the galactic center reveal. We cover S2’s 2018 pericenter passage, the record-setting S4714, gravitational redshift confirming Einstein, the Nobel Prize awarded to Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel, the G2 gas cloud that failed to be shredded, dramatic X-ray and infrared flares, and a star flung out of the galaxy entirely.

• Why interstellar dust makes the galactic center invisible in optical light and how infrared and radio see through it
• How rapidly orbiting gas around a Mercury-orbit-sized shadow blurred the Sagittarius A* image and required five years of processing
• Stars moving at 2.55 and 8 percent of light speed and the 4.297 million solar mass measurement they enable
• The G2 flop of 2014 and the theory that it was a merged binary star wearing a dusty disguise
• The temperature paradox: a black hole with Hawking radiation near absolute zero surrounded by gas at millions of degrees