Washington - Scientists using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global network of observatories working collectively to observe radio sources associated with black holes, have set an announcement for Thursday that signals they may finally have secured an image Sagittarius A*, or SgrA*.
The supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A, residing at the center of our spiral-shaped Milky Way galaxy is a beast, possessing 4 million times the mass of our sun and consuming any material including gas, dust and stars straying within its immense gravitational pull.
The researchers involved in this international collaboration did not disclose the nature of their announcement ahead of scheduled news conferences but issued a news release calling it a "groundbreaking result on the center of our galaxy."
In 2019, the EHT team unveiled the first-ever photo of a black hole. The image - a glowing ring of red, yellow and white surrounding a dark center - showed the supermassive black hole at the center of another galaxy called Messier 87, or M87.
The first image of the black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, using Event Horizon Telescope observations
The Sagittarius A* is located about 26,000 light-years (the distance light travels in a year), ie, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km) from Earth.
Known as a spiral galaxy, the Milky Way viewed from above or below resembles a spinning pinwheel, with our sun situated on one of the spiral arms and Sagittarius A* located at the center. The galaxy contains at least 100 billion stars.
The fact that black holes do not permit light to escape makes viewing them quite challenging. The project scientists have looked for a ring of light - super-heated disrupted matter and radiation circling at tremendous speed at the edge of the event horizon - around a region of darkness representing the actual black hole. This is known as the black hole's shadow or silhouette.
While disclosing the photo of the M87 black hole, the researchers said that their work showed that Albert Einstein, the famed theoretical physicist, had correctly predicted that the shape of the shadow would be almost a perfect circle.
Thursday's announcement will be made in simultaneous news conferences in the United States, Germany, China, Mexico, Chile, Japan and Taiwan. Netherlands-based radio astronomer Huib Jan van Langevelde is the current EHT project director.
-Reuters