For stargazers across the world, the time has finally come for one of the biggest scientific announcement of the year. At 15:00 Central European Summer Time (CEST) today, scientists at the European Commission, European Research Council, and the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project are expected to release the first-ever image of a black hole.
The release follows years of effort by the scientific community. Black holes—regions of spacetime where the gravity is so dense that even light itself cannot escape—are notoriously impossible to photograph. It is expected that the photograph would be achieved by capturing the “shadow” of the black hole on its accretion disc of light.
The image could be of one of two black holes, Sagitarrius A* or the supermassive black at the centre of Messiers 87. If you cannot wait to see what the image would look like, the YouTuber Veritasium has released a video explaining the likely image and its significance.
The event will be livestreamed across the world, with parallel events in Belgium (Brussels, English), Chile (Santiago, Spanish), Shanghai (Mandarin), Japan (Tokyo, Japanese), Taipei (Mandarin), and USA (Washington, D.C., English). You can watch the event live at the European Commission’s YouTube channel here:
