Ridley Scott, eat your heart out.

Like terrified moviegoers seated on the edges of their seats and at the mercy of their imaginations, astronomers expect this week to finally see the monster: a supermassive black hole.

At 9 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday April 10, a group of astronomers who run a globe-girdling network of radio telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope are expected to unveil their long awaited pictures of a pair of putative black holes. One of the objects sits at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, buried in the depths of interstellar dust and gas, and equivalent in mass to 4.1 million suns that otherwise have disappeared from the visible universe.

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The other target is in the heart of Messier 87, a giant galaxy in the constellation Virgo, where a black hole 7 billion times the mass of the sun is spewing a jet of energy thousands of light-years across space.

According to calculations, and if all has gone well, either or both of the black holes should appear as a tiny shadow backlit by the glow of radio energy at the galactic center.