Astronomers at the MIT Haystack Observatory, in collaboration with a team of international specialists, have managed to take the closest look ever at a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.

This was possible by using a “virtual telescope,” obtained by linking together radio dishes in Hawaii, Arizona and California. The result was a telescope capable of capturing details 1,000 times finer than the Hubble Telescope.

The astronomers believe this to be a groundbreaking step toward revealing unprecedented details on black holes. The target of the most recent observations was a black hole first discovered three decades ago, known as Sagittarius A*.

“This technique gives us an unmatched view of the region near the Milky Way’s central black hole,” said Shepherd Doeleman, lead author of the study, according to an MIT report. He also added that the image they’ve obtained is important evidence supporting the existence of black holes. The MIT team published its observations in the September 4 issue of Journal Nature.

A black hole is a region in space where gravity plays an essential role and is so strong that not even light can escape it. Sagittarius A* is approximately 25,000 light years away from Earth, and measures about one-third of the Earth-sun distance.

In order to make such observations possible, the team of astronomers used the very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) to link the radio signals from four radio telescopes: the Arizona Radio Observatory’s Submillimeter Telescope (ARO-SMT) of the University of Arizona, the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA) in California, and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) and the Submillimeter Array (SMA) in Hawaii.

This is indeed a remarkable discovery, but the astronomers don’t plan on stopping here: “this pioneering demonstrates that such observations are feasible,” Avi Loeb of the Harvard University said according to the MIT report. “It opens up a new window for probing the structure of space and time near a black hole and testing Einstein’s theory of gravity.”

In April this year, NASA scientists have managed to identify the smallest black hole discovered to date, which lies in the Milky Way Binary System known as XTE J1650-500, in the southern constellation Ara. The initial estimations revealed that the black hole could be three times the weight of the Sun.