“We’ve been studying black holes so long that sometimes it’s easy to forget that none of us has actually seen one,” said France Córdova, the director of the National Science Foundation, which funded the effort to capture humanity’s first image of a black hole. The Event Horizon Telescope is actually 10 telescopes, linked across four continents in the United States, Mexico, Chile, Spain, and Antarctica, and designed to scan the cosmos in radio waves. For a few days in April 2017, the observatories studied the skies in tandem, creating a gargantuan telescope nearly the size of the planet.
The human species is soon to see the first picture of that mysterious, iconic, invisible object Princeton physicist John Archibald Wheeler dubbed a black hole that lurks at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. On Wednesday, astronomers across the globe will hold “six major press conferences” simultaneously to announce the first results of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a virtual telescope with an effective diameter of the Earth—that has been pointing at the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole for the last several years.
The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has recently announced that the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project has just made a groundbreaking black hole discovery. The ESO announced that there would be a press conference about the recent discovery that is set to take place on April 10th at 15:00 CEST.
Astrophysicists have discovered a dozen black holes gathered around Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, supporting a decades-old prediction, opening up new opportunities to better understand the universe. After conducting a cosmic inventory to calculate and categorize stellar-remnant black holes, astronomers from the University of California concluded that there are probably tens of millions of the enigmatic, dark objects in the Milky Way – far more than expected.
The supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, Sagittarius A*, is by far the closest such object to us, only about 25 thousand light-years away. Although not nearly as active or luminous as other SMBHs, its relative proximity provides astronomers with a unique opportunity to probe what happens close to the “edge” of a black hole, which Einstein didn’t believe in, although general relativity predicted their existence.”.
