What happened to our galaxy?
Astronomers have long suspected a supermassive black hole 26,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius, behind the cloud of dust and gas that covers the center of the Milky Way. In this darkness, the equivalent of millions of stars were sent out forever, leaving behind a ghostly gravitational field and space-time swirling violently. No one knows where the door leads or what, if any, is on the other side.
Humanity is now preparing to take a closer look at this chaos. Over the past decade, an international team of more than 300 astronomers have trained the Event Horizon Telescope, a worldwide network of radio observatories, on the A* (pronounced A-star) arc, a faint source of radio waves. – the supposed black hole. – At the center of our galaxy. At 9 a.m. ET Thursday, a team led by Shepherd Doelman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, will release its latest findings at six simultaneous press conferences in Washington and around the world.
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