First Image Of A Black Hole Expected Today (UPDATED)

Scientific news item:

At last,  April 10 could mark the day scientists have been anticipating for more than a century as the first image of a black hole is expected to finally be revealed. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration will “present its first results in multiple simultaneous press conferences around the world,” according to a media release. While the EHT team did not specify that an image will be released, scientists around the world are expecting it.

However, an artist's rendering of a black hole has already been provided:


(Nate Beeler, The Columbus Dispatch - 2016)

In all seriousness, we hope to share images of the black hole if/when it becomes public.

UPDATE:  Here it is, folks --

Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun pic.twitter.com/AymXilKhKe

— Event Horizon 'Scope (@ehtelescope) April 10, 2019

A brief explanation of what you're seeing:

True to the nature of the science, the picture does not show the black hole itself. The defining feature of all black holes is that they are so dense, generating a gravity field so powerful, that nothing, not even electromagnetic energy—which, of course, includes visible light—can escape their pull. What the pictures reveal instead is the black holes’ so-called event horizons, the swirl of gas and dust and stars and light itself, circling the black hole drain, before they’re sucked inside never, ever to reemerge.

To use an overused word:  awesome.

Capturing Our Galaxy's Black Hole Event Horizon

This time, we're not talking about the black holes in the Oval Office and House Intelligence Committee.

Led by Shep Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, astronomers around the world will be looking to capture an image of the event horizon of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy:

... On Wednesday night, a battalion of 120 astronomers working at eight observatories on four continents will mobilize in an unprecedented effort to image the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, a body named Sagittarius A*. By combining observations from points across the globe, they'll create a virtual observatory the size of Earth itself. The “Event Horizon Telescope,” they call it. 

If all goes according to plan, the EHT should capture the dark silhouette of Sagittarius A* against the hot, glowing material that surrounds it, offering the first-ever glimpse at a black hole's event horizon. The resulting snapshot could confirm our understanding of the laws of the universe — or upend it. [snip]

Over five nights during a 10-day window beginning Wednesday, the eight telescopes of the EHT will swivel as one toward the center of the galaxy. Scientists in Chile's Atacama Desert, on a volcano top in Hawaii, at the frozen expanse of the South Pole and in the high, dry mountains of Arizona, Mexico and Spain will be ready to catch the data. If conditions are exactly right at each location — skies clear, instruments working — then Doeleman will give the signal to start observing. 

In addition to Sagittarius A*, the EHT will target a second, even more massive black hole in neighboring galaxy M87. 

Once they get their five nights of observations, the astronomers around the globe will deliver their findings to supercomputers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Doeleman expects to have two to three petabytes of data to look through — equivalent to the storage capacity of about 10,000 MacBooks. It will take the researchers months, if not years, to analyze all the findings. 

Here's where they'll be training their telescopes:

The black hole Sagittarius A* appears as a large bright spot in the orange cloud of dust at the center of the Milky Way. (D. Haggard et al. (NASA/CXC/Amherst College)