What is happening to our galaxy?
Astronomers have long suspected that there is a massive black hole, hidden behind the clouds of dust and gas that envelop the galaxy’s center, in the constellation Sagittarius, 26,000 light-years away. In this darkness, the equivalent of millions of stars has been sent for eternity, except for a ghostly gravitational field and violently twisted space-time. No one knows where the door leads or what, if anything, is on the other side.
Humanity is now ready to give this catastrophe its most intimate look. For the past decade, an international team of more than 300 astronomers has been training at the Event Horizon Telescope, a globe-spanning network of radio observatories, Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star), a faint source of radio wavessupposedly There is a black hole – at the center of our galaxy. On Thursday at 9 a.m. Eastern time, the team, led by Shepard Doleman, 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 surprised the world by producing the first picture of a black hole a supermassive torus of energy in the galaxy Messier 87, or M87, that envelops the emptiness.
“We have seen what we thought was invisible,” Dr. Doleman said at the time. That image is now installed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The uninformed bet is that the team has now managed to create an image of Sagittarius A*, the donut of our own doom. If Dr. Shepard’s team has once again observed the “invisible”, the achievement will reveal much about how the Milky Way works and what is revealed in its dim recesses.
The results could be spectacular and informative, said gravity theorist Janna Levine of Columbia University’s Barnard College, who was not part of the project. “I’m not bored with pictures of black holes yet,” she said.
