Scientists To Announce 'Groundbreaking' Discovery About Our Galaxy Later This Week

Scientists have teased a ‘groundbreaking’ discovery about our galaxy that they’ll be revealing on Thursday (12 May).

Astronomers of the European Southern Observatory (Eso) and the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project have promised seminal new information about the Milky Way, but other than that, information is thin on the ground. 

The event will take place at 2pm GMT at the Eso headquarters in Garching bei München, Germany, but can also be watched on Youtube and Eso’s website. 

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A press release published on Eso’s website on 28 April reads: “The ESO and EHT project will hold a press conference to present new Milky Way results from the EHT.”

The release was titled Press conference at ESO on groundbreaking Milky Way results from the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.

A report in The Independent has suggested that Thursday’s reveal may have something to do with a supermassive black hole smack bang in the middle of our galaxy.

The paper points to the fact that the Eso - an international organisation - operates the Very Large Telescope in Chile which recently shed light on the shape of black holes, suggesting they may look more like pancakes than donuts.

Meanwhile, the EHT project produced the first ever image of a black hole back in 2019, M87*.

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It follows the news that NASA has managed to record the sound of a black hole, with the government agency releasing audio demonstrating what the black hole at the centre of the Perseus galaxy cluster sounds like this month. 

On 4 May, NASA published a press release that explained: “In some ways, this sonification is unlike any other done before because it revisits the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

"The popular misconception that there is no sound in space originates with the fact that most of space is essentially a vacuum, providing no medium for sound waves to propagate through.

"A galaxy cluster, on the other hand, has copious amounts of gas that envelop the hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it, providing a medium for the sound waves to travel."

A NASA spokesperson continued: “The sound waves were extracted in radial directions, that is, outwards from the center. The signals were then re-synthesised into the range of human hearing by scaling them upward by 57 and 58 octaves above their true pitch," the release continued.

"Another way to put this is that they are being heard 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency."

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