In astrophysics milestone, first photo of black hole to be released

WASHINGTON - Scientists are expected to unveil on Wednesday the first-ever photograph of a black hole, a breakthrough in astrophysics providing insight into celestial monsters with gravitational fields so intense no matter or light can escape.

The US National Science Foundation has scheduled a news conference in Washington to announce a "groundbreaking result from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project," an international partnership formed in 2012 to try to directly observe the immediate environment of a black hole.

Simultaneous news conferences are scheduled in Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo.

A black hole's event horizon, one of the most violent places in the universe, is the point of no return beyond which anything - stars, planets, gas, dust, all forms of electromagnetic radiation including light - gets sucked in irretrievably.

While scientists involved in the research declined to disclose the findings ahead of the formal announcement, they are clear about their goals.

"It's a visionary project to take the first photograph of a black hole. We are a collaboration of over 200 people internationally," astrophysicist Sheperd Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, said at a March event in Texas.

The news conference is scheduled for 9 a.m. on Wednesday.

The research will put to the test a scientific pillar - physicist Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, according to University of Arizona astrophysicist Dimitrios Psaltis, project scientist for the Event Horizon Telescope. That theory, put forward in 1915, was intended to explain the laws of gravity and their relation to other natural forces.

The researchers targeted two supermassive black holes.

The first - called Sagittarius A - is situated at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy, possessing 4 million times the mass of our sun and located 26,000 light years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 9.5 trillion kilometers.

The second - called M87 - resides at the centre of the neighbouring Virgo A galaxy, boasting a mass 3.5 billion times that of the sun and located 54 million light years away from Earth. Streaming away from M87 at nearly the speed of light is a humongous jet of subatomic particles.