Daily Archives: May 12, 2022


 First Look at Black Hole in Center of Our Galaxy

An image once thought impossible becomes reality. Plus, the International Space Station has four fewer passengers. And you might have heard of the company that was trying to catch a rocket from the sky. It did it. Sort of. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space. …


Astronomers Capture 1st Image of Milky Way’s Huge Black Hole

The world got a look Thursday at the first wild but fuzzy image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers believe nearly all galaxies, including our own, have these giant black holes at their center, where light and matter cannot escape, making it extremely hard to get images of them. Light gets chaotically bent and twisted around by gravity as it gets sucked into the abyss along with superheated gas and dust. The colorized image unveiled Thursday is from the international consortium …


Justices to Meet for 1st Time Since Leak of Draft Roe Ruling

The Supreme Court’s nine justices will gather in private Thursday for their first scheduled meeting since the leak of a draft opinion that would overrule Roe v. Wade and sharply curtail abortion rights in roughly half the states. The meeting in the justices’ private, wood-paneled conference room could be a tense affair in a setting noted for its decorum. No one aside from the justices attends and the most junior among them, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is responsible for taking notes. Thursday’s conference comes at an especially fraught moment, with …


North Korea Officially Reports First COVID-19 Outbreak

North Korea officially confirmed its first COVID-19 outbreak Thursday, with state media reporting a sub-variant of the highly transmissible omicron virus, known as BA.2, had been detected in Pyongyang. “There has been the biggest emergency incident in the country, with a hole in our emergency quarantine front, that has been kept safely over the past two years and three months since February 2020,” the state media said. The report said people in Pyongyang contracted the omicron variant, without providing details on case numbers or possible sources of infection. The report …