A view of the Milky Way from an area of Puyehue National Park near Osorno City, Chile, May 8, 2008. REUTERS/Ivan Alvarado/File PhotoWASHINGTON, May 12 - Scientists are set to announce on Thursday what they call a "groundbreaking" Milky Way discovery in what could be the release of an image of the supermassive black hole lurking at our galaxy's center and devouring any matter wandering within its gargantuan gravitational pull.
This monstrous object possesses 4 million times the mass of our sun and is located about 26,000 light-years - the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles - from Earth. If the researchers indeed have managed to take a photograph of Sagittarius A*, it would be only the second black hole ever so pictured.
Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects with gravity so strong that not even light can escape, making viewing them quite challenging. A black hole's event horizon is the point of no return beyond which anything - stars, planets, gas, dust and all forms of electromagnetic radiation - gets dragged into oblivion.
The Event Horizon Telescope is a global network of observatories working collectively to observe radio sources associated with black holes. The project was begun in 2012 to try to directly observe the immediate environment of a black hole.
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