All geeked out

I’m a space freak. Always have been. I try and watch a little “Star Trek” everyday. Old episodes. New ones. Movies. Good ones. Bad. Doesn’t matter. In fact, my husband, Enrique, insists that when I retire I’ll sit around and watch “Star Trek” all day. He’s probably right.

All that said, I’m particularly excited about an announcement coming at 9am this morning.

Here’s what Space.com is saying. “The Event Horizon Telescope has spotted something incredible in the Milky Way galaxy… something its team is calling groundbreaking”.

That’s about all they are saying. The Event Horizon Team is scheduling a series of press conferences on this.

We can make an assumption. The EHT is a series of radio telescopes around the world that studies, primarily, black holes. According to Space.com, in 2019, the EHT similarly teased a new discovery that turned out to be the first-ever image of a black hole.

What’s a black hole? Wikipedia says it’s “a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing-no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light-can escape from it.”

I’m no astrophysicist, but that sounds like a dark, lonely place.

The New York Times takes this story a bit further. Dennis Overbye writes: “Has the Milky Way’s Black Hole Come to Light?”

Overbye writes that “astronomers have long suspected that 26,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius, lurking behind the clouds of dust and gas that shroud the center of the Milky Way, there is a massive black hole.”

How do you even figure this out? It has to do with radio waves, apparently.

Could that be what we are about to hear later this morning? A black hole in the center of our own galaxy?

I’ll have one eye on the teleprompter and another on my phone starting at 9am. I’ll let you know as soon as I know.

After that, a little “Star Trek” over lunch. A perfect day.