If the center of the Milky Way is a supermassive black hole, why is the center of the Milky Way the brightest part of every photograph of it?

Question

Wouldn’t it be, you know, a big black spot?

In: Other

Answer 1

It’s not just the black hole but what’s around it (the accretion disk). The hole itself is black, but consider spacetime. When we see a solar eclipse, we have seen stars that are geometrically behind the sun, but light from them travels in a straight line around the sun such that we can see them.

Now that effect would be massively intensified with an object as massive as a black hole to the point where we should see every star warping around it, and possibly even our own reflection lightyears in the past. From any angle, we should see millions of stars, making it a super bright object.