The first ever photo of a black hole is expected tomorrow
The Milky Way at night by DeTk
Predicted by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, black holes not only exist, but actually power some of the most extreme phenomena in the Universe. In the center of the Milky Way, astronomers say there is an enormous black hole. They call it "Sagitarius A" and it has a mass around 4 million times bigger than our sun. All that mass is compressed into a single point, a singularity, whose gravity is so strong that the stars that we know are orbiting around it.
Surrounding the black hole is what’s called the “event horizon,” which is the boundary beyond which nothing can escape the black hole’s gravity, not even light. Humanity had never directly seen a black hole or its event horizon.
Tomorrow, that might change. At 13:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), April 10, an international collaboration of scientists called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is releasing the results of an attempt to photograph Sagitarius A. By making a global experiment linking telescopes across Earth and resulting in the first-ever “photographs” of our own Galaxy’s central black hole.
Having a simultaneously press conference around the world on different countries:
- Brussels (in English)
- Lyngby (in Danish)
- Santiago (in Spanish)
- Shanghai (in Mandarin
- Tokyo (in Japanese)
- Taipei (in Mandarin)
- Washington D.C. (in English)
Simulation of a possible black hole by EHT