![]() The image of the black hole’s shadow released today pushes our view of the universe, and brings us a step closer in understanding how these celestial bodies behave. The M87 black hole is one of two black holes EHT is working on-data from the other black hole, Sagittarius A* at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, may be released later as the team continues to home in on its complexities. Scientists may soon shed light on the black hole’s “shadow.” #EHTblackhole /5UifupxvRm “The energetics around the black hole make it a point in the universe that is really beyond our everyday conception of the way things work.” “The event horizon is this very dangerous and spooky boundary around the black hole through which once you go, in any dimension, you’re never coming back,” Doeleman toldScience Friday back in 2012, when EHT first measured the inner orbit of the event horizon of the supermassive black hole in M87. The data from this image is a launching point for those researchers who want to know what know what is happening inside what Stephen Hawking described as “the edge of a shadow-the shadow of impending doom.” Green icons mark current sites, purple icons mark future sites, and blue icons mark historic sites. This “obscures the blackness that you’re trying to see there.”įrameborder=”0″ style=”border:0″>Ĭlick the markers on the interactive map to learn more about each site in the Event Horizon Telescope array. “At wavelengths there’s just too much light there,” Özel said. The short radio wavelengths were the perfect wavelength to pass through the gas that obstructs the shadow of the black hole, while giving the highest resolution possible. The team set the telescope array to 1.3 millimeter wavelengths. The Event Horizon Telescope is actually a network of eight radio dishes dotting the globe in high altitude sites, from the South Pole to Atacama, Chile, that together creates a virtual telescope the size of the planet Earth, explained Özel. To achieve the resolution of the black hole’s event horizon, the team needed an enormous, powerful telescope, one with 2,000 times the magnifying power of the Hubble Space Telescope. This glow indicates that the black hole is spinning. Past visualizations of black holes come from what researchers have simulated with data: A pit of darkness in the midst of a field of sparkling stars and galaxies the blinding, ethereal accretion disk from the film Interstellar or as Shep Doeleman explained in a 2012 Science Friday interview, “a rubber screen with a bowling ball in it that bends the rubber screen down.” But the image produced by the EHT reveals the shadow of the black hole-a soft ring of light illuminating an inky abyss. Credit: Chi-kwan Chan/University of Arizona “It’s basically like Interstellar, except that for the first time we’re hoping to do it with data,” astrophysicist Feryal Özel, an Event Horizon Telescope team member stationed at the telescope arrays in Arizona, said to Science Friday in a phone interview before the Wednesday announcement.Ī simulated video showing the turbulent plasma in the extreme environment around a black hole. “It’s sometimes easy to forget that none of us have actually seen one.” Córdova, director of the National Science Foundation, during the April 10 press conference. “We’ve been studying black holes for so long,” says France A. And it backs up Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The high-angular resolution image-made up of many snapshots like a collage-depicts the 6 billion solar-mass black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, or M87, some 55 million light years away. It reveals that the theorized event horizon, that inescapable pull at the membrane of the black hole, exists. Related Segment Plunging Into The Physics Of The First Black Hole Image What you’re seeing is evidence of the event horizon.” What you’re seeing here is the last photon orbit. “We have seen what we thought was unseeable,” says EHT Director Shep Doeleman, during the April 10 press conference. “This is a remarkable achievement. Today, the international team of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) released the first-ever image of a black hole darkened by the effects of the event horizon, the invisible boundary where nothing, not gas, dust, or even light, can escape its powerful gravitational grasp. Credit: Event Horizon TelescopeĮditor’s note: This is a breaking news story and has been updated with new information throughout.īlack holes have evaded a real closeup for centuries, the elusive beasts of the universe slipping by unseen-until now. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow. ![]() ![]() ![]() A planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration-was designed to capture images of a black hole. ![]()
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