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| Meta Title | Moon phase today: What the Moon will look like on April 18 |
| Meta Description | The first-ever photo of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, was released May 12 by the Event Horizon Telescope team. |
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| Boilerpipe Text | Astronomers revealed the invisible.
The first image of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our galaxy.
Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
Astronomers have at long last seen the center of the Milky Way galaxy, unmasking a giant black hole, a celestial vortex 26,000 light-years from Earth that should otherwise be hidden from sight.
An international team of researchers released on Thursday a snapshot of the supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A*
,
spied through the power of eight linked radio dishes from around the world that together can penetrate through gas clouds in outer space. Though black holes are by definition unseeable — light can't travel fast enough to escape their clutches — Sagittarius A* revealed itself in the form of a black shadow surrounded by the bright glow of the gas and debris swirling around its perimeter.
The photo showed a region in deep space reminiscent of a solar eclipse — a darkened circle, wreathed in a radiant red-orange fuzz of light. The image was colorized so that human eyes could perceive it.
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Up until three years ago, any depiction of a black hole was merely an artist's interpretation or a computer model of what the spinning, spacetime-bending phenomenon might look like. This object, seen in the photo at the top of this story, is the real deal, each pixel representing a Herculean effort:
hundreds of scientists
from 80 institutions around the globe, working together to collect, process, and piece together fragments of data.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
The breakthrough was also
published in the science
journal
Astrophysical Journal Letters
. Spokespeople from the
Event Horizon Telescope
, the international collaboration of 300 scientists who worked on the feat, hosted simultaneous press conferences in at least seven countries to share the news, including the United States at the National Press Club in the nation's capital.
The image of
Sagittarius A*
, pronounced "Sagittarius A-Star," is a monumental achievement, the second such time scientists have overcome the barrier of invisibility to glimpse a black hole.
The first photo
, revealed in April 2019, showcased the black hole that resides at the center of the
Messier 87 galaxy
, an easier target to capture because of its size, despite its being much farther, at about 53 million light-years away. Astronomers say that black hole, dubbed M87*, is as large as Earth's eight-planet solar system.
The second photo provides powerful confirmation to the scientific community, said Feryal Ă–zel, a professor of astronomy and physics from the University of Arizona.
"Now we know that it wasn't a coincidence — it wasn't some aspect of the environment that happened to look like the ring that we expected to see," she said at the news event in Washington, D.C. "We now know that, in both cases, what we see is the heart of the black hole, the point of no return. These two images look similar because they are the consequence of fundamental forces of gravity."
Black holes, ranked
What's actually going on in that cryptic black hole photo?
Mesmerizing image of black hole reveals magnetic field
NASA highlights a massive black hole blazing fiery plasma trails across the cosmos
This graphic shows how much larger the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87 is than Sagittarius A* (which lies at the center of our Milky Way galaxy).
Credit: National Science Foundation / Keyi "Onyx" Li
Sagittarius A*
,
or Sgr A* for short, is considerably smaller, at some 27 million miles across, but it's no pipsqueak. Scientists estimate it to be 4 million times more massive than the sun. To make a difficult number to grasp even more unfathomable, imagine this: The sun's mass is equal to 333,000 Earths.
Its Milky Way home, a spiral galaxy, is fairly flat, but the center sinks down where the supermassive black hole sits. All around it are stars zipping in varied directions. But the hole, often anthropomorphized in pop culture as a space monster, is actually quite "gentle," researchers say, consuming relatively little from its environment.
Black holes are some of the most elusive things in outer space. The most common kind, called a
stellar black hole
, is often thought to be the result of an enormous star dying in a supernova explosion. The star's material then collapses onto itself, condensing into a relatively tiny area.
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But how
supermassive black holes
, millions to billions of times more massive than the sun, form is even more mysterious than typical stellar black holes. Many astrophysicists and cosmologists believe these behemoths lurk at the center of virtually all galaxies. Recent Hubble Space Telescope observations have
bolstered the theory
that supermassive black holes get their start in the dusty cores of starburst galaxies, where new stars are rapidly churned out, but scientists are still chipping away at the problem.
Black holes don't have surfaces, like on a planet or star. Instead, they have a boundary called an
"event horizon,"
It's a point of no return. If anything swoops too close, it will fall in, never to escape the hole's gravitational pull.
Before the May 12 breakthrough image, the Event Horizon Telescope team released the first photo of a black hole in the Messier 87 galaxy in April 2019.
Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
If M87*
offered proof that black holes weren't science fiction, Sgr A* is the testament to decades of mounting observational science. Prior to the first black hole photo, scientists inferred a hole's presence in space by detecting its impact on nearby stars and gas. Albert Einstein, whose theory of general relativity predicted black holes over a century ago, and Stephen Hawking, a cosmologist who devoted much of his career to mathematically proving their existence, are among the many figures who paved the way for Thursday's revelation.
If M87* offered proof that black holes weren't science fiction, Sgr A* is the testament to decades of mounting observational science.
Sgr A* is exciting to scientists because it's ordinary, said Michael Johnson of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. the central supermassive black hole is representative of many others in the universe, allowing experts to learn more about these mysterious space objects.
Despite their visual similarities —
a flaming doughnut
versus another flaming doughnut — the two black holes couldn't be more different, scientists said. M87*
is accumulating matter at a significantly faster rate, but the Milky Way's central black hole changes in appearance more quickly: It takes mere minutes for gas to fully orbit it, whereas an orbit around its predecessor lasts about two weeks.
Moreover, the first photographed black hole launches a humongous jet of radiation that extends as far as the edge of its galaxy, while Sgr A* does not.
To collect the massive amount of data needed to process the new image, the Event Horizon Telescope used a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry, which syncs up observatories around the world and takes advantage of Earth's rotation to form one virtual planet-sized telescope. Together, the instruments were able to view the sky with sight on par with that needed to read a newspaper in New York from Paris, according to the organization.
At the time of the 2019 black hole announcement, Event Horizon Telescope collaborators said they had attempted to create an image of this supermassive black hole as well, but the team hadn't been able to get a clear picture. As
one of the most studied supermassive black holes
in the universe, that came as a disappointment to many astrophysicists who yearned to gaze at our galaxy's own navel.
"For me personally, I met it 20 years ago and have loved it and tried to understand it since," Ă–zel said Thursday.
This time around, scientists added the South Pole Telescope, which wasn't used in the M87* photo, to the virtual telescope array to improve the resolution of their imaging. Researchers gathered five petabytes-worth of data, about
2.5 trillion pages of printed text
, to catch even a glimmer of this black hole, said Dom Pesce, a member of the telescope team.
Put another way, that's the equivalent amount of data in about 100 million TikTok videos, said Vincent Fish, a research scientist at MIT Haystack Observatory. That's way too much to stream over the internet, so scientists had to ship hundreds of hard drives to two centers in Western Massachusetts and Bonn, Germany, where supercomputers could crunch the raw data.
Credit: Daniel Michalik / National Science Foundation
Admittedly, the Sgr A* photo is blurry. Johnson likened the blur to peering through frosted glass. Radio waves containing crucial image details are scattered, making the hole's sharp outline look more like a jelly ring. To fix that, the telescopes either need to be farther apart or reach higher frequencies, he said.
"We don't think that the black hole is actually a blurry image on the sky," Johnson said. "We're just at our breaking point here."
"We don't think that the black hole is actually a blurry image on the sky."
With financial support from the
National Science Foundation
and other groups, scientists plan to enhance their technology to make the image drastically sharper.
Another next step for the collaboration is to attempt to turn these still images into videos, so that scientists can observe how gas is falling toward the black holes' event horizons. That project could be completed sometime after 2024, they said.
But in case anyone out there is underwhelmed by another flaming doughnut, Katie Bouman, an assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech, had a reminder about just how much data is packed into the picture.
"This image is actually one of the sharpest images you've ever seen," she said.
Elisha Sauers writes about space for Mashable, taking deep dives into
NASA's moon and Mars missions
, chatting up
astronauts
and history-making
discoverers
, and jetting
above the clouds
. Through 17 years of reporting, she's covered a variety of topics, including health, business, and government, with a penchant for public records requests. She previously worked for
The Virginian-Pilot
in Norfolk, Virginia, and
The Capital
in Annapolis, Maryland. Her work has earned numerous state awards, including the Virginia Press Association's top honor,
Best in Show
, and
national recognition
for narrative storytelling. For each year she has covered space, Sauers has won
National Headliner Awards
, including first place for her
Sex in Space
series. Send space tips and story ideas to
[email protected]
or text 443-684-2489. Follow her on X at
@elishasauers
.
The Moon is starting to come back.
Credit: Photo by Omer Tarsuslu/Anadolu via Getty Images
The New Moon has now passed, which means each night the Moon will appear bigger and brighter in the sky. This happens as more of its sunlit side comes into view from Earth. From now, it will become more illuminated each night until the next full Moon.
What is today’s Moon phase?
As of Saturday, April 18, the
Moon
phase is Waxing Crescent. Tonight, 1% of the moon will be lit up, according to
NASA's Daily Moon Guide
.
The Moon is starting to brighten again, but for now, there's still to little of its surface lit up to see anything.
When is the next Full Moon?
The next Full Moon is predicted to take place on May 1, the first of two in May.
What are Moon phases?
NASA
states that the Moon takes about 29.5 days to orbit Earth, during which it passes through eight distinct phases. We always see the same side of the Moon, but the amount of sunlight reflecting off it changes as it moves along its orbit, creating the familiar pattern of full, partial, and crescent shapes. These shifting appearances are called lunar phases, and there are eight in total:
New Moon - The Moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it's invisible to the eye).
Waxing Crescent - A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).
First Quarter - Half of the Moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-Moon.
Waxing Gibbous - More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.
Full Moon - The whole face of the Moon is illuminated and fully visible.
Waning Gibbous - The Moon starts losing light on the right side. (Northern Hemisphere)
Third Quarter (or Last Quarter) - Another half-Moon, but now the left side is lit.
Waning Crescent - A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.
Lois Mackenzie is a freelance reporter at Mashable. Over the years she has written for many publications, covering everything from the local news to the best pair of running shoes. You can find bylines in publications including Fit&Well, Metro, and Coach magazine, usually covering deals on everything from earbuds to TVs, or guides on how to beat your half marathon time.
Lois also holds a Master's degree in Digital Journalism from Strathclyde University and obtained a Master of Arts in English Literature at the University of Aberdeen. |
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# Behold the Milky Way's supermassive black hole in first-ever photo
Astronomers revealed the invisible.
By
[Elisha Sauers](https://mashable.com/author/elisha-sauers)
Elisha Sauers
Elisha Sauers writes about space for Mashable, taking deep dives into [NASA's moon and Mars missions](https://mashable.com/article/why-nasa-going-to-moon-artemis), chatting up [astronauts](https://mashable.com/article/nasa-artemis-2-moon-commander-reid-wiseman) and history-making [discoverers](https://mashable.com/article/black-hole-milky-way-discovery-sagittarius-a), and jetting [above the clouds](https://mashable.com/article/solar-eclipse-flight-delta-2024). Through 17 years of reporting, she's covered a variety of topics, including health, business, and government, with a penchant for public records requests. She previously worked for *The Virginian-Pilot* in Norfolk, Virginia, and *The Capital* in Annapolis, Maryland. Her work has earned numerous state awards, including the Virginia Press Association's top honor,
[Best in Show](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruwl6a8d2Z4)
, and
[national recognition](https://featuresjournalism.org/contests-2/sfj-27th-annual-winners-by-category/)
for narrative storytelling. For each year she has covered space, Sauers has won
[National Headliner Awards](https://www.headlinerawards.org/2024-online/)
, including first place for her [Sex in Space](https://mashable.com/series/sex-in-space) series. Send space tips and story ideas to
[\[email protected\]](https://mashable.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#32575e5b415a531c41534757404172485b54545f57565b531c515d5f)
or text 443-684-2489. Follow her on X at
[@elishasauers](https://twitter.com/elishasauers)
.
[Read Full Bio](https://mashable.com/author/elisha-sauers)
on
May 13, 2022
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The first image of Sagittarius A\*, the black hole at the center of our galaxy. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
***
Astronomers have at long last seen the center of the Milky Way galaxy, unmasking a giant black hole, a celestial vortex 26,000 light-years from Earth that should otherwise be hidden from sight.
An international team of researchers released on Thursday a snapshot of the supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A\**,* spied through the power of eight linked radio dishes from around the world that together can penetrate through gas clouds in outer space. Though black holes are by definition unseeable — light can't travel fast enough to escape their clutches — Sagittarius A\* revealed itself in the form of a black shadow surrounded by the bright glow of the gas and debris swirling around its perimeter.
The photo showed a region in deep space reminiscent of a solar eclipse — a darkened circle, wreathed in a radiant red-orange fuzz of light. The image was colorized so that human eyes could perceive it.
***
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***
***
Up until three years ago, any depiction of a black hole was merely an artist's interpretation or a computer model of what the spinning, spacetime-bending phenomenon might look like. This object, seen in the photo at the top of this story, is the real deal, each pixel representing a Herculean effort: [hundreds of scientists](https://eventhorizontelescope.org/ "(opens in a new window)") from 80 institutions around the globe, working together to collect, process, and piece together fragments of data.
> [This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.](https://twitter.com/ehtelescope/status/1524737908892049408 "(Opens in a new tab) (opens in a new window)")
The breakthrough was also [published in the science](https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205/page/Focus_on_First_Sgr_A_Results "(opens in a new window)") journal *Astrophysical Journal Letters*. Spokespeople from the [Event Horizon Telescope](https://eventhorizontelescope.org/ "(opens in a new window)"), the international collaboration of 300 scientists who worked on the feat, hosted simultaneous press conferences in at least seven countries to share the news, including the United States at the National Press Club in the nation's capital.
The image of [Sagittarius A\*](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/black-hole-SagittariusA.html "(opens in a new window)"), pronounced "Sagittarius A-Star," is a monumental achievement, the second such time scientists have overcome the barrier of invisibility to glimpse a black hole. [The first photo](https://mashable.com/article/black-hole-picture-scientists-explain), revealed in April 2019, showcased the black hole that resides at the center of the [Messier 87 galaxy](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/messier-87 "(opens in a new window)"), an easier target to capture because of its size, despite its being much farther, at about 53 million light-years away. Astronomers say that black hole, dubbed M87\*, is as large as Earth's eight-planet solar system.
The second photo provides powerful confirmation to the scientific community, said Feryal Ă–zel, a professor of astronomy and physics from the University of Arizona.
"Now we know that it wasn't a coincidence — it wasn't some aspect of the environment that happened to look like the ring that we expected to see," she said at the news event in Washington, D.C. "We now know that, in both cases, what we see is the heart of the black hole, the point of no return. These two images look similar because they are the consequence of fundamental forces of gravity."
SEE ALSO:
[Astronomers see first supermassive black hole as it's growing up](https://mashable.com/article/black-hole-found-nasa-hubble-telescope)
- [Black holes, ranked](https://mashable.com/article/interesting-black-holes-outer-space)
- [What's actually going on in that cryptic black hole photo?](https://mashable.com/article/black-hole-picture-scientists-explain)
- [Mesmerizing image of black hole reveals magnetic field](https://mashable.com/article/black-hole-polarized-light)
- [NASA highlights a massive black hole blazing fiery plasma trails across the cosmos](https://mashable.com/article/hubble-photo-3c-348-galaxy-black-hole-plasma-jets)
This graphic shows how much larger the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87 is than Sagittarius A\* (which lies at the center of our Milky Way galaxy). Credit: National Science Foundation / Keyi "Onyx" Li
Sagittarius A\**,* or Sgr A\* for short, is considerably smaller, at some 27 million miles across, but it's no pipsqueak. Scientists estimate it to be 4 million times more massive than the sun. To make a difficult number to grasp even more unfathomable, imagine this: The sun's mass is equal to 333,000 Earths.
Its Milky Way home, a spiral galaxy, is fairly flat, but the center sinks down where the supermassive black hole sits. All around it are stars zipping in varied directions. But the hole, often anthropomorphized in pop culture as a space monster, is actually quite "gentle," researchers say, consuming relatively little from its environment.
Black holes are some of the most elusive things in outer space. The most common kind, called a [stellar black hole](https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/black-holes "(opens in a new window)"), is often thought to be the result of an enormous star dying in a supernova explosion. The star's material then collapses onto itself, condensing into a relatively tiny area.
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But how [supermassive black holes](https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/black_hole_description.html "(opens in a new window)"), millions to billions of times more massive than the sun, form is even more mysterious than typical stellar black holes. Many astrophysicists and cosmologists believe these behemoths lurk at the center of virtually all galaxies. Recent Hubble Space Telescope observations have [bolstered the theory](https://mashable.com/article/black-hole-found-nasa-hubble-telescope) that supermassive black holes get their start in the dusty cores of starburst galaxies, where new stars are rapidly churned out, but scientists are still chipping away at the problem.
Black holes don't have surfaces, like on a planet or star. Instead, they have a boundary called an ["event horizon,"](https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/objects/black_holes1.html "(opens in a new window)") It's a point of no return. If anything swoops too close, it will fall in, never to escape the hole's gravitational pull.
Before the May 12 breakthrough image, the Event Horizon Telescope team released the first photo of a black hole in the Messier 87 galaxy in April 2019. Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
If M87\*offered proof that black holes weren't science fiction, Sgr A\* is the testament to decades of mounting observational science. Prior to the first black hole photo, scientists inferred a hole's presence in space by detecting its impact on nearby stars and gas. Albert Einstein, whose theory of general relativity predicted black holes over a century ago, and Stephen Hawking, a cosmologist who devoted much of his career to mathematically proving their existence, are among the many figures who paved the way for Thursday's revelation.
"If M87\* offered proof that black holes weren't science fiction, Sgr A\* is the testament to decades of mounting observational science."
Sgr A\* is exciting to scientists because it's ordinary, said Michael Johnson of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. the central supermassive black hole is representative of many others in the universe, allowing experts to learn more about these mysterious space objects.
Despite their visual similarities — [a flaming doughnut](https://mashable.com/article/black-hole-memes-jokes-sagittarius-a) versus another flaming doughnut — the two black holes couldn't be more different, scientists said. M87\*is accumulating matter at a significantly faster rate, but the Milky Way's central black hole changes in appearance more quickly: It takes mere minutes for gas to fully orbit it, whereas an orbit around its predecessor lasts about two weeks.
Moreover, the first photographed black hole launches a humongous jet of radiation that extends as far as the edge of its galaxy, while Sgr A\* does not.
To collect the massive amount of data needed to process the new image, the Event Horizon Telescope used a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry, which syncs up observatories around the world and takes advantage of Earth's rotation to form one virtual planet-sized telescope. Together, the instruments were able to view the sky with sight on par with that needed to read a newspaper in New York from Paris, according to the organization.
At the time of the 2019 black hole announcement, Event Horizon Telescope collaborators said they had attempted to create an image of this supermassive black hole as well, but the team hadn't been able to get a clear picture. As [one of the most studied supermassive black holes](https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=304214&org=NSF "(opens in a new window)") in the universe, that came as a disappointment to many astrophysicists who yearned to gaze at our galaxy's own navel.
"For me personally, I met it 20 years ago and have loved it and tried to understand it since," Ă–zel said Thursday.
This time around, scientists added the South Pole Telescope, which wasn't used in the M87\* photo, to the virtual telescope array to improve the resolution of their imaging. Researchers gathered five petabytes-worth of data, about [2\.5 trillion pages of printed text](https://pweb.cfa.harvard.edu/news/connecting-dots-black-hole-theory-actual-images "(opens in a new window)"), to catch even a glimmer of this black hole, said Dom Pesce, a member of the telescope team.
Put another way, that's the equivalent amount of data in about 100 million TikTok videos, said Vincent Fish, a research scientist at MIT Haystack Observatory. That's way too much to stream over the internet, so scientists had to ship hundreds of hard drives to two centers in Western Massachusetts and Bonn, Germany, where supercomputers could crunch the raw data.
Credit: Daniel Michalik / National Science Foundation
Admittedly, the Sgr A\* photo is blurry. Johnson likened the blur to peering through frosted glass. Radio waves containing crucial image details are scattered, making the hole's sharp outline look more like a jelly ring. To fix that, the telescopes either need to be farther apart or reach higher frequencies, he said.
"We don't think that the black hole is actually a blurry image on the sky," Johnson said. "We're just at our breaking point here."
""We don't think that the black hole is actually a blurry image on the sky.""
With financial support from the [National Science Foundation](https://beta.nsf.gov/blackholes "(opens in a new window)") and other groups, scientists plan to enhance their technology to make the image drastically sharper.
Another next step for the collaboration is to attempt to turn these still images into videos, so that scientists can observe how gas is falling toward the black holes' event horizons. That project could be completed sometime after 2024, they said.
But in case anyone out there is underwhelmed by another flaming doughnut, Katie Bouman, an assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech, had a reminder about just how much data is packed into the picture.
"This image is actually one of the sharpest images you've ever seen," she said.
Topics [Innovations](https://mashable.com/category/innovations)
Elisha Sauers
Elisha Sauers writes about space for Mashable, taking deep dives into [NASA's moon and Mars missions](https://mashable.com/article/why-nasa-going-to-moon-artemis), chatting up [astronauts](https://mashable.com/article/nasa-artemis-2-moon-commander-reid-wiseman) and history-making [discoverers](https://mashable.com/article/black-hole-milky-way-discovery-sagittarius-a), and jetting [above the clouds](https://mashable.com/article/solar-eclipse-flight-delta-2024). Through 17 years of reporting, she's covered a variety of topics, including health, business, and government, with a penchant for public records requests. She previously worked for *The Virginian-Pilot* in Norfolk, Virginia, and *The Capital* in Annapolis, Maryland. Her work has earned numerous state awards, including the Virginia Press Association's top honor, [Best in Show](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruwl6a8d2Z4 "(opens in a new window)"), and [national recognition](https://featuresjournalism.org/contests-2/sfj-27th-annual-winners-by-category/ "(opens in a new window)") for narrative storytelling. For each year she has covered space, Sauers has won [National Headliner Awards](https://www.headlinerawards.org/2024-online/ "(opens in a new window)"), including first place for her [Sex in Space](https://mashable.com/series/sex-in-space) series. Send space tips and story ideas to [\[email protected\]](https://mashable.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#a1c4cdc8d2c9c08fd2c0d4c4d3d2e1dbc8c7c7ccc4c5c8c08fc2cecc "(opens in a new window)") or text 443-684-2489. Follow her on X at [@elishasauers](https://twitter.com/elishasauers "(opens in a new window)").
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# Moon phase today: What the Moon will look like on April 18
The Moon is starting to come back.
By
[Lois Mackenzie](https://mashable.com/author/lois-mackenzie)
Lois Mackenzie
Lois Mackenzie is a freelance reporter at Mashable. Over the years she has written for many publications, covering everything from the local news to the best pair of running shoes. You can find bylines in publications including Fit\&Well, Metro, and Coach magazine, usually covering deals on everything from earbuds to TVs, or guides on how to beat your half marathon time.
[Read Full Bio](https://mashable.com/author/lois-mackenzie)
on
April 18, 2026
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Credit: Photo by Omer Tarsuslu/Anadolu via Getty Images
***
The New Moon has now passed, which means each night the Moon will appear bigger and brighter in the sky. This happens as more of its sunlit side comes into view from Earth. From now, it will become more illuminated each night until the next full Moon.
## What is today’s Moon phase?
As of Saturday, April 18, the [Moon](https://mashable.com/article/ispace-moon-lander-south-pole-image) phase is Waxing Crescent. Tonight, 1% of the moon will be lit up, according to [NASA's Daily Moon Guide](https://moon.nasa.gov/moon-observation/daily-moon-guide/?intent=011#1767622046258::0:: "(opens in a new window)").
The Moon is starting to brighten again, but for now, there's still to little of its surface lit up to see anything.
## When is the next Full Moon?
The next Full Moon is predicted to take place on May 1, the first of two in May.
## What are Moon phases?
[NASA](https://science.nasa.gov/moon/moon-phases/ "(opens in a new window)") states that the Moon takes about 29.5 days to orbit Earth, during which it passes through eight distinct phases. We always see the same side of the Moon, but the amount of sunlight reflecting off it changes as it moves along its orbit, creating the familiar pattern of full, partial, and crescent shapes. These shifting appearances are called lunar phases, and there are eight in total:
New Moon - The Moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it's invisible to the eye).
Waxing Crescent - A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).
First Quarter - Half of the Moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-Moon.
Waxing Gibbous - More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.
Full Moon - The whole face of the Moon is illuminated and fully visible.
Waning Gibbous - The Moon starts losing light on the right side. (Northern Hemisphere)
Third Quarter (or Last Quarter) - Another half-Moon, but now the left side is lit.
Waning Crescent - A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.
Lois Mackenzie
Lois Mackenzie is a freelance reporter at Mashable. Over the years she has written for many publications, covering everything from the local news to the best pair of running shoes. You can find bylines in publications including Fit\&Well, Metro, and Coach magazine, usually covering deals on everything from earbuds to TVs, or guides on how to beat your half marathon time.
Lois also holds a Master's degree in Digital Journalism from Strathclyde University and obtained a Master of Arts in English Literature at the University of Aberdeen.
***
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| Readable Markdown | Astronomers revealed the invisible.
The first image of Sagittarius A\*, the black hole at the center of our galaxy. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
Astronomers have at long last seen the center of the Milky Way galaxy, unmasking a giant black hole, a celestial vortex 26,000 light-years from Earth that should otherwise be hidden from sight.
An international team of researchers released on Thursday a snapshot of the supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A\**,* spied through the power of eight linked radio dishes from around the world that together can penetrate through gas clouds in outer space. Though black holes are by definition unseeable — light can't travel fast enough to escape their clutches — Sagittarius A\* revealed itself in the form of a black shadow surrounded by the bright glow of the gas and debris swirling around its perimeter.
The photo showed a region in deep space reminiscent of a solar eclipse — a darkened circle, wreathed in a radiant red-orange fuzz of light. The image was colorized so that human eyes could perceive it.
***
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Up until three years ago, any depiction of a black hole was merely an artist's interpretation or a computer model of what the spinning, spacetime-bending phenomenon might look like. This object, seen in the photo at the top of this story, is the real deal, each pixel representing a Herculean effort: [hundreds of scientists](https://eventhorizontelescope.org/ "(opens in a new window)") from 80 institutions around the globe, working together to collect, process, and piece together fragments of data.
> [This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.](https://twitter.com/ehtelescope/status/1524737908892049408 "(Opens in a new tab) (opens in a new window)")
The breakthrough was also [published in the science](https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205/page/Focus_on_First_Sgr_A_Results "(opens in a new window)") journal *Astrophysical Journal Letters*. Spokespeople from the [Event Horizon Telescope](https://eventhorizontelescope.org/ "(opens in a new window)"), the international collaboration of 300 scientists who worked on the feat, hosted simultaneous press conferences in at least seven countries to share the news, including the United States at the National Press Club in the nation's capital.
The image of [Sagittarius A\*](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/black-hole-SagittariusA.html "(opens in a new window)"), pronounced "Sagittarius A-Star," is a monumental achievement, the second such time scientists have overcome the barrier of invisibility to glimpse a black hole. [The first photo](https://mashable.com/article/black-hole-picture-scientists-explain), revealed in April 2019, showcased the black hole that resides at the center of the [Messier 87 galaxy](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/messier-87 "(opens in a new window)"), an easier target to capture because of its size, despite its being much farther, at about 53 million light-years away. Astronomers say that black hole, dubbed M87\*, is as large as Earth's eight-planet solar system.
The second photo provides powerful confirmation to the scientific community, said Feryal Ă–zel, a professor of astronomy and physics from the University of Arizona.
"Now we know that it wasn't a coincidence — it wasn't some aspect of the environment that happened to look like the ring that we expected to see," she said at the news event in Washington, D.C. "We now know that, in both cases, what we see is the heart of the black hole, the point of no return. These two images look similar because they are the consequence of fundamental forces of gravity."
- [Black holes, ranked](https://mashable.com/article/interesting-black-holes-outer-space)
- [What's actually going on in that cryptic black hole photo?](https://mashable.com/article/black-hole-picture-scientists-explain)
- [Mesmerizing image of black hole reveals magnetic field](https://mashable.com/article/black-hole-polarized-light)
- [NASA highlights a massive black hole blazing fiery plasma trails across the cosmos](https://mashable.com/article/hubble-photo-3c-348-galaxy-black-hole-plasma-jets)
This graphic shows how much larger the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87 is than Sagittarius A\* (which lies at the center of our Milky Way galaxy). Credit: National Science Foundation / Keyi "Onyx" Li
Sagittarius A\**,* or Sgr A\* for short, is considerably smaller, at some 27 million miles across, but it's no pipsqueak. Scientists estimate it to be 4 million times more massive than the sun. To make a difficult number to grasp even more unfathomable, imagine this: The sun's mass is equal to 333,000 Earths.
Its Milky Way home, a spiral galaxy, is fairly flat, but the center sinks down where the supermassive black hole sits. All around it are stars zipping in varied directions. But the hole, often anthropomorphized in pop culture as a space monster, is actually quite "gentle," researchers say, consuming relatively little from its environment.
Black holes are some of the most elusive things in outer space. The most common kind, called a [stellar black hole](https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/black-holes "(opens in a new window)"), is often thought to be the result of an enormous star dying in a supernova explosion. The star's material then collapses onto itself, condensing into a relatively tiny area.
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But how [supermassive black holes](https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/black_hole_description.html "(opens in a new window)"), millions to billions of times more massive than the sun, form is even more mysterious than typical stellar black holes. Many astrophysicists and cosmologists believe these behemoths lurk at the center of virtually all galaxies. Recent Hubble Space Telescope observations have [bolstered the theory](https://mashable.com/article/black-hole-found-nasa-hubble-telescope) that supermassive black holes get their start in the dusty cores of starburst galaxies, where new stars are rapidly churned out, but scientists are still chipping away at the problem.
Black holes don't have surfaces, like on a planet or star. Instead, they have a boundary called an ["event horizon,"](https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/objects/black_holes1.html "(opens in a new window)") It's a point of no return. If anything swoops too close, it will fall in, never to escape the hole's gravitational pull.
Before the May 12 breakthrough image, the Event Horizon Telescope team released the first photo of a black hole in the Messier 87 galaxy in April 2019. Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
If M87\*offered proof that black holes weren't science fiction, Sgr A\* is the testament to decades of mounting observational science. Prior to the first black hole photo, scientists inferred a hole's presence in space by detecting its impact on nearby stars and gas. Albert Einstein, whose theory of general relativity predicted black holes over a century ago, and Stephen Hawking, a cosmologist who devoted much of his career to mathematically proving their existence, are among the many figures who paved the way for Thursday's revelation.
"If M87\* offered proof that black holes weren't science fiction, Sgr A\* is the testament to decades of mounting observational science."
Sgr A\* is exciting to scientists because it's ordinary, said Michael Johnson of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. the central supermassive black hole is representative of many others in the universe, allowing experts to learn more about these mysterious space objects.
Despite their visual similarities — [a flaming doughnut](https://mashable.com/article/black-hole-memes-jokes-sagittarius-a) versus another flaming doughnut — the two black holes couldn't be more different, scientists said. M87\*is accumulating matter at a significantly faster rate, but the Milky Way's central black hole changes in appearance more quickly: It takes mere minutes for gas to fully orbit it, whereas an orbit around its predecessor lasts about two weeks.
Moreover, the first photographed black hole launches a humongous jet of radiation that extends as far as the edge of its galaxy, while Sgr A\* does not.
To collect the massive amount of data needed to process the new image, the Event Horizon Telescope used a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry, which syncs up observatories around the world and takes advantage of Earth's rotation to form one virtual planet-sized telescope. Together, the instruments were able to view the sky with sight on par with that needed to read a newspaper in New York from Paris, according to the organization.
At the time of the 2019 black hole announcement, Event Horizon Telescope collaborators said they had attempted to create an image of this supermassive black hole as well, but the team hadn't been able to get a clear picture. As [one of the most studied supermassive black holes](https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=304214&org=NSF "(opens in a new window)") in the universe, that came as a disappointment to many astrophysicists who yearned to gaze at our galaxy's own navel.
"For me personally, I met it 20 years ago and have loved it and tried to understand it since," Ă–zel said Thursday.
This time around, scientists added the South Pole Telescope, which wasn't used in the M87\* photo, to the virtual telescope array to improve the resolution of their imaging. Researchers gathered five petabytes-worth of data, about [2\.5 trillion pages of printed text](https://pweb.cfa.harvard.edu/news/connecting-dots-black-hole-theory-actual-images "(opens in a new window)"), to catch even a glimmer of this black hole, said Dom Pesce, a member of the telescope team.
Put another way, that's the equivalent amount of data in about 100 million TikTok videos, said Vincent Fish, a research scientist at MIT Haystack Observatory. That's way too much to stream over the internet, so scientists had to ship hundreds of hard drives to two centers in Western Massachusetts and Bonn, Germany, where supercomputers could crunch the raw data.
Credit: Daniel Michalik / National Science Foundation
Admittedly, the Sgr A\* photo is blurry. Johnson likened the blur to peering through frosted glass. Radio waves containing crucial image details are scattered, making the hole's sharp outline look more like a jelly ring. To fix that, the telescopes either need to be farther apart or reach higher frequencies, he said.
"We don't think that the black hole is actually a blurry image on the sky," Johnson said. "We're just at our breaking point here."
""We don't think that the black hole is actually a blurry image on the sky.""
With financial support from the [National Science Foundation](https://beta.nsf.gov/blackholes "(opens in a new window)") and other groups, scientists plan to enhance their technology to make the image drastically sharper.
Another next step for the collaboration is to attempt to turn these still images into videos, so that scientists can observe how gas is falling toward the black holes' event horizons. That project could be completed sometime after 2024, they said.
But in case anyone out there is underwhelmed by another flaming doughnut, Katie Bouman, an assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech, had a reminder about just how much data is packed into the picture.
"This image is actually one of the sharpest images you've ever seen," she said.
Elisha Sauers writes about space for Mashable, taking deep dives into [NASA's moon and Mars missions](https://mashable.com/article/why-nasa-going-to-moon-artemis), chatting up [astronauts](https://mashable.com/article/nasa-artemis-2-moon-commander-reid-wiseman) and history-making [discoverers](https://mashable.com/article/black-hole-milky-way-discovery-sagittarius-a), and jetting [above the clouds](https://mashable.com/article/solar-eclipse-flight-delta-2024). Through 17 years of reporting, she's covered a variety of topics, including health, business, and government, with a penchant for public records requests. She previously worked for *The Virginian-Pilot* in Norfolk, Virginia, and *The Capital* in Annapolis, Maryland. Her work has earned numerous state awards, including the Virginia Press Association's top honor, [Best in Show](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruwl6a8d2Z4 "(opens in a new window)"), and [national recognition](https://featuresjournalism.org/contests-2/sfj-27th-annual-winners-by-category/ "(opens in a new window)") for narrative storytelling. For each year she has covered space, Sauers has won [National Headliner Awards](https://www.headlinerawards.org/2024-online/ "(opens in a new window)"), including first place for her [Sex in Space](https://mashable.com/series/sex-in-space) series. Send space tips and story ideas to [\[email protected\]](https://mashable.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#a1c4cdc8d2c9c08fd2c0d4c4d3d2e1dbc8c7c7ccc4c5c8c08fc2cecc "(opens in a new window)") or text 443-684-2489. Follow her on X at [@elishasauers](https://twitter.com/elishasauers "(opens in a new window)").
The Moon is starting to come back.
Credit: Photo by Omer Tarsuslu/Anadolu via Getty Images
The New Moon has now passed, which means each night the Moon will appear bigger and brighter in the sky. This happens as more of its sunlit side comes into view from Earth. From now, it will become more illuminated each night until the next full Moon.
## What is today’s Moon phase?
As of Saturday, April 18, the [Moon](https://mashable.com/article/ispace-moon-lander-south-pole-image) phase is Waxing Crescent. Tonight, 1% of the moon will be lit up, according to [NASA's Daily Moon Guide](https://moon.nasa.gov/moon-observation/daily-moon-guide/?intent=011#1767622046258::0:: "(opens in a new window)").
The Moon is starting to brighten again, but for now, there's still to little of its surface lit up to see anything.
## When is the next Full Moon?
The next Full Moon is predicted to take place on May 1, the first of two in May.
## What are Moon phases?
[NASA](https://science.nasa.gov/moon/moon-phases/ "(opens in a new window)") states that the Moon takes about 29.5 days to orbit Earth, during which it passes through eight distinct phases. We always see the same side of the Moon, but the amount of sunlight reflecting off it changes as it moves along its orbit, creating the familiar pattern of full, partial, and crescent shapes. These shifting appearances are called lunar phases, and there are eight in total:
New Moon - The Moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it's invisible to the eye).
Waxing Crescent - A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).
First Quarter - Half of the Moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-Moon.
Waxing Gibbous - More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.
Full Moon - The whole face of the Moon is illuminated and fully visible.
Waning Gibbous - The Moon starts losing light on the right side. (Northern Hemisphere)
Third Quarter (or Last Quarter) - Another half-Moon, but now the left side is lit.
Waning Crescent - A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.
Lois Mackenzie is a freelance reporter at Mashable. Over the years she has written for many publications, covering everything from the local news to the best pair of running shoes. You can find bylines in publications including Fit\&Well, Metro, and Coach magazine, usually covering deals on everything from earbuds to TVs, or guides on how to beat your half marathon time.
Lois also holds a Master's degree in Digital Journalism from Strathclyde University and obtained a Master of Arts in English Literature at the University of Aberdeen.
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