A Supermassive Black Hole is seen in the Middle of our Galaxy

Katherine Bouman, a Caltech computational imaging scientist, said that “What’s cooler than seeing the black spot at the center of our Milky Way?”

“They are among the most mysterious objects in all of existence, and they hold the keys for large-scale structure in our observable universe,” Sheperd Doeleman, an astrophysicist at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in an interview ahead of Thursday’s briefing.

The central black hole of the Milky Way has been inferred from the effects it has on stars and dust around it, rather than being directly observed. It is quite far away, approximately 27,000 light-years, and despite its “supermassive”, is not large in the grand scheme, making a direct observation with telescopes very difficult.

The Event Horizon Telescope was created in response to the challenge. It is not just one telescope, but several. Very Long Baseline Interferometry is an observational technique that requires precise calibration. This allows multiple radio dishes distributed across the globe to work as one instrument, Earth-sized, and allows them to use the same observational technique. This technique, according to the consortium, allows distant objects to be resolved in a way that is comparable to being able to spot a ping-pong ball on the Moon.

There are two types of black holes: “Stellar-mass,” formed when stars collide, and “supermassive,” monsters that can be millions and even billions more than our sun. This is what the Event Horizon Telescope was designed to detect.