ASTRONOMERS AIM TO TAKE FIRST PICTURE OF BLACK HOLE

Taking a picture of a black hole, an object so gravitationally bound that not even photons of light can escape, sounds like an oxymoron, but astronomers this week will attempt to do just that.

What they're hoping to glimpse is something called the "event horizon" -- the swirl of matter and energy that are visible around the rim of the black hole just before it falls into the abyss.

"Even five years ago, such a proposal would not have seemed credible," Sheperd Doeleman, assistant director of the Haystack Observatory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the lead researcher on the project, called the Event Horizon Telescope, said in a press release.

"Now we have the technological means to take a stab at it," he added.

The target for the shoot is the supermassive black hole that lives in the heart of our galaxy, the Milky Way. It's about 4 million times as massive as the sun, but it's extremely compressed and far away, nearly 26,000 light-years. To astronomers, it's like looking at a grapefruit on the moon.