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What’s going on in our galaxy?
Astronomers have long suspected a massive black hole 26,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius, lurking behind clouds of dust and gas that blanket the center of the Milky Way. Into this darkness the equivalent of millions of stars were sent into infinity, leaving a ghostly gravitational field and violently warped space-time. No one knows where the door opened or what happened on the other side.
Humanity is now preparing to get its most intimate glimpse into this turmoil. For the past decade, an international team of more than 300 astronomers has been training the Event Horizon Telescope, a worldwide network of radio observatories, on Sagittarius A* (pronounced A star), a weak source of radio waves. black hole — at the center of our galaxy. At 9 a.m. Eastern time on Thursday, the team led by Sheperd Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, will release their latest results at six simultaneous news conferences in Washington and around the world.
The team is determined not to speak to the news media. But in April 2019, the same group stunned the world by producing. first photo of black hole – A supermassive energy ring surrounding the void in the Messier 87 or M87 galaxy.
Dr. “We saw what we thought was invisible,” Doeleman said at the time. This image is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The uninformed bet is that the team has now managed to produce an image of our own doomsday donut, Sagittarius A*. Dr. If Sheperd’s team saw the “unseen” once again, that feat would reveal a lot about how the galaxy works and what goes on in its dim recesses.
Gravity theorist Janna Levin at Barnard College of Columbia University, who was not part of the project, said the results could be spectacular and informative. “I’m not tired of black hole pictures yet,” she said.
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