Radio astronomers are making a lot of progress in studying the center of the Milky Way lately, gaining their best measurements yet of the forces at the center of our galaxy -- forces that are driven by a black hole with a mas equal to four million Suns and a diameter of 14,000,000 miles. (That white dot in the picture, made by the Very Large Array, signifies the location of the black hole.)
Radio astronomy is essential to studying the galactic core because the region is so shrouded by dust that visible-light telescopes, like Mount Palomar or the Hubble Space Telescope, can't see into it. But radio telescopy has other difficulties to overcome: radiation emissions from the core are heavily distorted by all the forces at play there, so the task is compared to "trying to spot a yellow rubber duck through the frosted glass of a shower stall".
The amount of knowledge about our universe that can be gleaned from tiny wisps of data collected on the surface of our backwater planet, and the care with which that data is organized into knowledge of the cosmos by scientists, never ceases to astound me.
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