An illustration of how a black hole may appear. Researchers hope to present the first-ever image of a black hole later this winter. (Photo: NASA/Alain Riazuelo)

At the center of our Milky Way galaxy, near the border of the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius, exists a supermassive black hole. Dubbed Sagittarius A* (Sgr A* for short), this all-consuming region of spacetime spans a distance of more than 27 million miles and is estimated to have a light-sucking core 4 million times the mass of the sun. Because of its relatively close distance to Earth, a separation of "only" 26,000 light-years, it's also one of the few black holes to have been observed influencing the flow of matter nearby.

For the first time in the history of photography, we may soon possess a photo of this celestial monster.

"To be precise, we are not going to take a direct photograph of the black hole at our galaxy’s heart," Manchester University astronomer Tom Muxlow told the Guardian last February. "We are actually going to take a picture of its shadow. It will be an image of its silhouette sliding against the background glow of radiation of the heart of the Milky Way. That photograph will reveal the contours of a black hole for the first time."

A distant view of Sagittarius A* captured using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. (Photo: NASA)

Despite its supermassive size, Sgr A* is far enough away from us to present a massive challenge for any one telescope to capture. According to Nature, it would require something with a resolution more than 1,000 times better than the Hubble Space Telescope to pull off. Instead, astronomers decided to create something bigger –– much bigger.

Last April, astronomers synchronized a global network of radio telescopes to observe the immediate environment of Sgr A*. Together, like the fictional robot character Voltron, they combined to form the Event Horizon Telescope, a virtual planet-sized observatory capable of capturing unprecedented detail over great distances.

"Instead of building a telescope so big that it would probably collapse under its own weight, we combined eight observatories like the pieces of a giant mirror," Michael Bremer, an astronomer at the International Research Institute for Radio Astronomy (IRAM) and a project manager for the Event Horizon Telescope, told the AFP. "This gave us a virtual telescope as big as Earth — about 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) in diameter."

The participating locations of the radio telescopes that synchronized to form the planet-sized Event Horizon Telescope. (Photo: European Southern Observatory)

Over several days, locked to each other using the exceptional precision of atomic clocks, the radio telescopes captured an enormous amount of data on Sgr A*.

According to European Southern Observatory, its Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a participating partner in the Event Horizon Telescope, alone recorded over a petabyte (1 million gigabytes) of information on the black hole. Too large to send over the Internet, the physical hard drives were sent via plane and input into computing clusters (called a correlator) located at the MIT Haystack Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.

And then the researchers waited. Part of the reason why it's taken so long to receive a final image has to do with the eighth participating radio telescope stationed in Antarctica. Because no flights are possible from February to October, the final data set captured by the South Pole Telescope was literally placed in cold storage. On Dec. 13, it finally arrived at the Haystack Observatory.

"After the disks have warmed up, they will be loaded into playback drives and processed with data from the other 7 EHT stations to complete the Earth-sized virtual telescope that links dishes from the South Pole, to Hawaii, Mexico, Chile, Arizona, and Spain," the team excitedly announced last month. "It should take about 3 weeks to complete the comparison of recordings, and after that the final analysis of the 2017 EHT data can begin!"

So what might we expect to see once the number-crunching is complete? Interestingly, some scientists believe it may look something like the black hole that director Christopher Nolan carefully crafted for his film "Interstellar."

The black hole created for the film 'Interstellar.' (Photo: 'Interstellar')

In addition to its shadow, the researchers are also hopeful to image the black hole's event horizon or the point at which nothing, not even light, can escape its gaping maw. It's here in these observations, according to Robert Laing of the European Southern Observatory, that Einstein's theory of general relativity will face one of its greatest tests.

"We want to see whether the idea of a black hole having an event horizon is actually right and whether the quantitative predictions of what its shadow should look like are correct," he told the Guardian. "If general relativity is wrong in some way, you should eventually be able to see deviations from its predictions in the shape of the shadow and behavior of our galaxy’s great black hole."

Whatever image is finally revealed, it's likely to only deepen the questions and awe surrounding these mysterious astronomical phenomena. The sheer engineering alone that has given rise to this historical moment is reason enough to celebrate.

“It is the challenge of doing something, that has never been attempted before," astrophysicist and EHT science chair Heino Falcke said. "It is the start of an adventurous journey towards a black hole."