After years of global efforts, the first ever images of our own Galaxy's central black hole are expected to come out within this year, according to scientists working in the project.

 

经过多年的全球努力，银河系中心黑洞的首张照片有望于今年内面世。
 

 

"We're very optimistic that it will succeed. We've done almost everything," Sheperd Doeleman, project director and senior astronomer¹ at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Xinhua at a conference session of the on-going 10-day South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference and Festivals, a platform that gathers innovators and entrepreneurs² from across the globe to breed and fund new ideas.

 

Doeleman said that the remaining work is testing and double checking what have been obtained, after that the images will be finalized³ and officially announced sometime in 2019.

 

According to four scientists, involved in the project along with about 200 scientists globally, who delivered speeches at the conference session, the expected images are products of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which is a global effort to construct an Earth-sized virtual⁴ telescope array⁵, able to actually "photograph" nearby supermassive black holes. It had its first full run in April 2017, collected data of black holes with eight telescopes around the globe, including one in the South Pole.

 

"We've a goal of seeing something that struggles with all of its might to be unseen, and we're pushing the technology as far as we can go," said Doeleman.

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