In April last yr , an international collaboration assay to do something humans have never done before : take an image of Sagittarius A * , the supermassive black hole at the eye of the Milky Way . The final shipment of datum was received by the collaboration last month and they have now begun analyzing it in full , meaning we may soon have the first ever image of a black cakehole .
It might seem weird to have such wide time spread between reflexion and psychoanalysis but there ’s a very interesting reason . To have such gamey precision effigy , astronomers had to use a technique known as service line interferometry , where radio telescopes that are very far from each other are linked up to make a practical telescope as wide as their distance .
The Event Horizon Telescope , as it is called , used telescopes from all over the earth including Antarctica , where they had to expect for weather conditions to be suitable to embark the hard - cause with the data to MIT ’s Haystack Observatory . The observations , which were received onDecember 13 , were also shipped to the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy , in Germany . Astronomers in both locations will analyze it .
In a printing press spillage last month , the team explained that it would take about three weeks to complete the comparison of the two squad ’s recordings after which the final analysis of the observations can genuinely start . The data could birth novel insight into the quantum car-mechanic versus relativity debate . contraband holes are one of the capable areas where the two theories struggle to play together
In the meanwhile , we ’ll have to look and see . Hopefully , the observations have been successful and soon we will have an image of the effect celestial horizon of Sagittarius A * , the boundary of the black hole itself . Beyond it , the gravity is so vivid that not even light can escape .
Sagittarius A * weigh 4 million Suns , and is " just"44 million kilometers(27 million miles ) in diameter . Being 26,000 wakeful - geezerhood away from Earth gives it the apparent size of it in the sky similar to looking at a certificate of deposit on the aerofoil of the Moon from Earth . This is why the investigator needed a scope as wide-cut as the Earth to see it .
