First black hole image: How to watch the 'groundbreaking' announcement
Today, at 9 a.m. ET, we might see the first-ever actual image of a black hole.
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project is an international collaboration aimed to capture the first image of a black hole. And now, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is holding a press conference to announce that project's "groundbreaking result."
UPDATE: April 10, 2019, 3:21 p.m. CEST The Event Horizon Telescope has posted the first-ever image of a black hole, located at the center of the galaxy Messier 87. Check it out below.
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Press conferences will be held simultaneously in Brussels (in English), Lyngby (in Danish), Santiago (in Spanish), Shanghai (in Mandarin), Tokyo (in Japanese), Taipei (in Mandarin), and Washington D.C. (in English).
You'll also be able to watch a live stream of the event, below.
The EHT is not a single physical telescope; instead, it's an array of linked radio dishes across the globe, creating an Earth-sized virtual telescope.
A black hole is an object with such strong gravitational pull that nothing, even light, can escape it. The black hole itself is invisible (don't expect to see anything like the special effects in Interstellar), but the surrounding matter illuminates its "shadow," which can be seen. The particular black holes the EHT is focusing on are the central black hole in our own galaxy as well as the supermassive black hole in the center of galaxy M87, and getting a glimpse of these is a pretty big deal.
Read more about the project here.
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
