Will Dunham

WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – Scientists will announce what they believe to be a ground-breaking Milky Way discovery on Thursday. This could include the publication of an image showing the supermassive Black Hole lurking in our galaxy’s centre and eating any matter that wanders within its immense gravitational pull.

They are members of Event Horizon Telescope, an international collaboration which in 2019 revealed the first ever photo of a dark hole. They have been concentrating recently on the black hole called Sagittarius A*, or SgrA*, at the heart of the Milky Way.

The monstrous black hole is 4,000,000 times larger than our sun. It’s located approximately 26,000 light years from Earth. This distance, which represents the length of light traveled in one year, is 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). If the researchers indeed have managed to take a photograph of Sagittarius A*, it would be only the second black hole ever so pictured.

Three years ago the EHT Project released an image from the center of Messier 87. This picture, known as M87, showed a glowing ring surrounded by a dark center.

The announcement of Thursday will take place simultaneously in news conferences in Japan, the United States and China at 9 AM EDT (1300 GMT). 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.”

It is difficult to see black holes because they are so dense that even light cannot escape. Black holes’ event horizon, which is where all electromagnetic radiation, stars, planets, gases, and dust, stops, can be described as the point at which everything – including light, stars, particles, or gas – will disappear into infinity.

Scientists have searched for the ring of lights – superheated, disrupted material and radiation that circles at incredible speed around the event horizon. This ring represents the black hole. This is the “black hole’s silhouette” or shadow.

Event Horizon Telescope, a worldwide network of observatories that works together to detect radio signals associated with black holes, is the Event Horizon Telescope. In 2012, the project was launched to observe directly the surrounding environment of a dark hole.

There are several types of black hole. Starlight-mass black hole are smaller than the ones that formed when massive stars collided at the end of their lifetime cycles. Also, there are intermediate-mass dark holes that have a higher mass. Finally, there is the supermassive and massive black holes which reside in the middle of all galaxies. They are believed to have formed relatively quickly after the formation of their galaxies.

Milky Way, a spiral galaxy with at least 100 million stars. Viewed from above or below it resembles a spinning pinwheel, with our sun situated on one of the spiral arms and Sagittarius A* located at the center.

The M87 black hole is far more distant and massive than Sagittarius A*, situated about 54 million light-years from Earth with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun.