This black hole has been a 'monster lurking' for decades. New photos expose it

While we were all going about our puny mortal existences on this tiny rock, an array of telescopes stretching from Hawaii to Western Europe to the South Pole captured the first-ever image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

It’s called “Sagittarius A Star” – and it was first discovered back in February 1974.

These groundbreaking snapshots were just released last week, but back in the 1970s, Professor Bruce Balick with the University of Washington's Department of Astronomy was part of a team that first found Sagittarius A*.

Soundside host Libby Denkmann sat down with Balick to talk about discovering Sagittarius A* at the very start of his career and how these photos could inform our future understanding of black holes. To Balick, finally getting to see pictures of the black hole was "thrilling."