Reacción a "Reactions to the first image of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy"

When they presented the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) result on M87 I found it to be one of the most striking (rather than important) results in observational astrophysics in the last decades. Because it is a picture, not a graph or any other kind of complicated data, which makes it straightforward for everyone to understand ("Because you saw me, Thomas, you believed...") and therefore to internalise that black holes really exist and are as Einstein predicted (although he himself was sceptical). Which is why the first thing for me is the potential that these images have in society.

This is certainly a global collaboration, where different countries and scientific communities (and disciplines other than physics) are collaboratively involved. Where practically all the facilities that can contribute something have come together.

At the Gran Telescopio Canarias there is no immediate implication of the new observations of Sagittarius A*, although the centre of our galaxy is an obvious target for any telescope, and as always the understanding of the black hole phenomenon at any scale (stellar, where the Gran Telescopio Canarias is obtaining important results, or galactic is based on many different kinds of studies. 

I would say that in the case of Sagittarius A* the Event Horizon Telescope image will be the icing on a very big cake, thanks to all the previous studies, including of course the work of Nobel Laureate Reinhard Genzel with the telescopes of the European Southern Observatory, which I think is one of the most important observational results in modern astrophysics.