Shocking black hole found in centre of Milky Way galaxy
Scientists are set to announce on Thursday what they call a "groundbreaking" Milky Way discovery in what could be the release of an image of the supermassive black hole lurking at our galaxy's center and devouring any matter wandering within its gargantuan gravitational pull.
The researchers are part of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) international collaboration that in 2019 unveiled the first-ever photo of a black hole. They have been concentrating recently on the black hole called Sagittarius A*, or SgrA*, at the heart of the Milky Way.
This monstrous object possesses 4 million times the mass of our sun and is located about 26,000 light-years - the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km) - from Earth. If the researchers indeed have managed to take a photograph of Sagittarius A*, it would be only the second black hole ever so pictured.
The EHT project three years ago released an image of the supermassive black hole at the center of another galaxy called Messier 87, or M87, showing a glowing ring of red, yellow and white surrounding a dark center.
Thursday's announcement will be made in simultaneous news conferences at 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT) in the United States, Germany, China, Mexico, Chile, Japan and Taiwan. The researchers have declined to disclose the nature of the announcement ahead of time but in a news release called it a "groundbreaking result on the center of our galaxy."
Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects with gravity so strong that not even light can escape, making viewing them quite challenging. A black hole's event horizon is the point of no return beyond which anything - stars, planets, gas, dust and all forms of electromagnetic radiation - gets dragged into oblivion.
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