Scientists are about to 'photograph' a black hole - for the first time ever

Black holes are staples of sci-fi films such as Interstellar – but humans have never actually seen one.

That could change this April, though – with a new radio telescope which scientists hope will produce an image of the ‘event horizon’ around the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.

The Event Horizon Telescope will turn our entire planet into a radio dish – using computer power to ‘fill in the gaps’ as huge radio dishes all over the planet ‘tune in’ to the supermassive black hole.

‘There’s great excitement,’ project leader Sheperd Doeleman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics told the BBC.

‘In April we’re going to make the observations that we think have the first real chance of bringing a black hole’s event horizon into focus.’

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The scientists hope that the radio telescopes will capture the event horizon – the point beyond which nothing can escape from the black hole, not even light.

It will look like a ring of bright light around a dark blob, they believe – although the black hole is 26,000 light years from Earth, so it’s the size of a pinprick in the night sky.

The scientists describe the project as like ‘trying to photograph a grapefruit on the moon’.

The black hole, known as Sagittarius A* is thought to pull in stars, gas clouds and planets, devouring them with its huge gravity – it is four million times the mass of our sun.