Arcade Fire Help Unveil First Photo Of Our Galaxy’s Black Hole With “Sagittarius A*” Performance For The European Southern Observatory

1:52 PM EDT on May 12, 2022

IN SPACE – MAY 12: In this handout photo provided by NASA, This is the first image of Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy, with an added black background to fit wider screens. It’s the first direct visual evidence of the presence of this black hole. It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an array which linked together eight existing radio observatories across the planet to form a single Earth-sized virtual telescope. The telescope is named after the event horizon, the boundary of the black hole beyond which no light can escape. The image of the Sgr A* black hole is an average of the different images the EHT Collaboration has extracted from its 2017 observations. In addition to other facilities, the EHT network of radio observatories that made this image possible includes the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX) in the Atacama Desert in Chile, co-owned and co-operated by ESO is a partner on behalf of its member states in Europe. (Photo by NASA Via Getty Images)

|NASA Via Getty Images

It's a big day for astronomy and astrophysics fans: The international consortium behind the Event Horizon Telescope revealed the first pictures of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, calling it a "gentle giant" that barely gobbles up any galactic material at all. And of course, this being May 2022, Arcade Fire were somehow involved.

The black hole's name is "Sagittarius A*," which is also not coincidentally the subtitle of Arcade Fire's new WE track "End Of The Empire IV." That's the one that begins, "I unsubscribe," and also features the lyrics, "One Christ Child and one on the way/ Why don't we name her Sagittarius A?" Win Butler amd Régine Chassagne were on hand at the European Southern Observatory to play the song during the introductory press conference.

On Arcade Fire's social media accounts, Butler wrote:

There is so much that we don’t understand about ourselves; our minds, our planet, our solar system.
When I first read about Sagittarius A*, the super massive black hole that sits in the center of our galaxy, it felt symbolic of all we seek to understand about ourselves, and yet fail to fully grasp…
And today, WE know a little bit more, thanks to the collaboration of a vast network of telescopes and scientists all over the world. A testament to what we can accomplish together as humanity…
Perhaps "We'll see one day, what's on the other side."
Thank you so much @esoastronomy for the invitation to perform, it was an honor.
Luv
Win

Arcade Fire's cover of Harry Styles' recent #1 hit "As It Was" also debuted today in a separate instance of album promo. Check out the "Sagittarius A*" and "We" performance below.

https://twitter.com/arcadefire/status/1524795176400601088
https://twitter.com/arcadefire/status/1524795209678299136
https://twitter.com/ESO/status/1524751644017061889