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WASHINGTON – Scientists will announce on Thursday what they call a “revolutionary” discovery of the Milky Way in what could be the release of an image of a supermassive black hole lurking in the center of our galaxy and engulfing any matter wandering within. of its gigantic gravitational pull.
The researchers are part of the international collaboration of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which in 2019 revealed the first photo of its kind in a black hole. Recently, they have been concentrating on a black hole called Sagittarius A *, or SgrA *, in the heart of the Milky Way.
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This monstrous object has 4 million times the mass of our sun and is about 26,000 light-years – the distance that light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km) – from Earth. If the researchers really managed to take a picture of Sagittarius A *, this will be only the second black hole ever taken.
Three years ago, the EHT project released an image of a supermassive black hole in the center of another galaxy called Messier 87 or M87, showing a glowing ring of red, yellow and white surrounding a dark center.
The announcement on Thursday will be made at simultaneous press conferences at 9 am EDT (1300 GMT) in the United States, Germany, China, Mexico, Chile, Japan and Taiwan. Researchers refused to reveal the nature of the message some time ago, but in a press release called it a “revolutionary result at the center of our galaxy.”
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Black holes are extremely dense objects with such strong gravity that even light cannot escape, which makes looking at them quite challenging. The event horizon of a black hole is the point of no return, beyond which everything – stars, planets, gas, dust and all forms of electromagnetic radiation – is forgotten.
Scientists from the project have searched for a ring of light – superheated disturbed matter and radiation circulating at great speed on the edge of the event horizon – around an area of darkness that represents the actual black hole. This is known as the shadow or silhouette of the black hole.
The Event Horizon Telescope is a global network of observatories working collectively to monitor radio sources associated with black holes. The project was launched in 2012 to try to directly monitor the immediate environment of a black hole.
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There are different categories of black holes. The smallest are the so-called black holes with stellar mass, formed by the collapse of massive individual stars at the end of their life cycle. There are also black holes with a medium mass, a step up on the table. Finally, there are the supermassive black holes that inhabit the center of most galaxies. They are thought to have emerged relatively soon after the formation of their galaxies, consuming vast amounts of material to reach colossal proportions.
The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy that contains at least 100 billion stars. Viewed from above or below it resembles a rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating rotating center.
The black hole M87 is much farther and more massive than Sagittarius A *, located about 54 million light-years from Earth with a mass 6.5 billion times larger than that of our sun.
(Report by Will Dunham, edited by Rosalba O’Brien)
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