The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project is unveiling a major black hole discovery Wednesday morning (April 10), and you can watch the event live.
The EHT, a global effort to capture the first-ever photo of a black hole's immediate environment, will announce its first results during a press conference Wednesday at 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT). You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of the U.S. National Science Foundation, or directly via the NSF.
EHT team members haven't revealed what the result is, but an NSF media advisory described it as "groundbreaking." So it's not outlandish to speculate that the project may have succeeded in its chief goal, and that we may be treated to a spectacular image of a black hole's silhouette.
Related: Images: Black Holes of the Universe
Photographing the interior of a black hole is impossible, of course: Any light that strays too close to one of these gravitational monsters is lost forever. (This point of no return is known as the event horizon, which explains the project's name.)
NSF director France Córdova will deliver remarks at tomorrow's press conference, which will be held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
The following EHT team members will also speak:
- Project director Sheperd Doeleman, of Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics;
- Daniel Marrone of the University of Arizona;
- Avery Broderick of the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics;
- Sera Markoff of the University of Amsterdam.
The EHT links up multiple radio telescopes around the world, forming a virtual scope the size of Earth. The project has been peering at two supermassive black holes — the one at the heart of our own Milky Way galaxy, and the one at the core of the galaxy M87.
The new results are based on EHT's first observing run, which took place over the course of one week in April 2017.
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Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
