Black Hole Hunters Cast Gaze at Center of the Milky Way Galaxy

This artist’s concept shows a black hole with an accretion disk—a flat structure of material orbiting the black hole, and a jet of hot gas, called plasma, on Oct. 30, 2017. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout via Reuters

WASHINGTON—Residing at the center of our spiral-shaped Milky Way galaxy is a beast—a supermassive black hole possessing 4 million times the mass of our sun and consuming any material including gas, dust, and stars straying within its immense gravitational pull.

Scientists have been using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global network of observatories working collectively to observe radio sources associated with black holes, to study this Milky Way denizen and have set an announcement for Thursday that signals they may finally have secured an image of it. The black hole is called Sagittarius A*, or SgrA*.