Data on the black hole at the center of our galaxy has yet to be released. These were the largest black holes they believed they could get a clear shot of in April. The critical moment came in April 2017, when eight radio telescopes located in Antarctica, Greenland, South America, North America, Hawaii, and Europe all pointed their dishes to the black hole in the center of our galaxy, and to the one at the center of Messier 87. The image of the Messier 87 galaxy released today is the result of a seven-year international collaboration, the Event Horizon Telescope, to build that Earth-size telescope, involving 200 scientists and eight observatories around the world. To take a picture of something that small, you need a huge telescope, one the size of the Earth. Taking a picture of the shadow cast by a supermassive black hole is like taking a photo of a quarter in Los Angeles all the way from Washington, DC. Compared to the full moon, the shadow cast by the M87 black hole is 46.5 million times smaller. Again: The shadow cast by the black hole is tiny. And there are 1 million microarcseconds in an arcsecond. In science-speak, the shadow cast by the M87 black hole is around 40 microarcseconds wide when viewed from the Earth. It’s not just that black holes are dark they’re actually very small, and are surrounded by bright gas and swirling material (the M87 black hole shoots out a jet of hot plasma that’s more than 4,000 light-years long). There’s a reason we’ve never seen a picture of a black hole until today. “Even though the black hole does not have a surface, it removes all the light that goes near it, so it behaves like a very dark object,” he explains. In this way, the black hole casts a shadow on its surroundings. “Every ray of light, every photon that goes near the black hole, actually bends toward the black hole and gets completely removed from the universe as we know it,” Dimitrios Psaltis, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona and one of the lead scientists on the effort, says. The image “did bring tears to my eyes it’s an amazing image.” How scientists took advantage of a “cosmic opportunity” to photograph a black holeīlack holes are black because the singularity sucks up all the light around it. It’s easy for us to forget that none of us have actually seen one,” said France Córdova, director of the National Science Foundation, which helped fund the project. “As an astrophysicist, this is a thrilling day for me. ![]() ![]() It’s a truly remarkable moment for humans to be able to see something so enigmatic, so far away, and so incredibly difficult to capture. ![]() The absence in the image means something has left our observable universe. The light in the center gets sucked out of our view irretrievably. The size and shape of this black hole, the researchers say, is exactly as predicted in Einstein’s theories of gravity.Īs you look at this image, know that this isn’t an object. Within that photon orbit is the event horizon, the region beyond which no light can escape. ![]() That light encircles the photon orbit, a region beyond which light could conceivably escape from but is unlikely to. The visible reddish and white light surrounding it is material being destroyed by the immense gravity of the black hole. “As with all great discoveries, this is just the beginning.”Īt the center of this image is the M87 black hole. The announcement coincided with the publication of six studies on the effort in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “We exposed part of the universe we thought was invisible before,” Sheperd Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope, said at the press conference announcing the image Wednesday. The black hole at its center is massive, some 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun, all contained in a single point of infinite density. This is a picture of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, which is 53.49 million light-years away. Here it is, humanity, the first-ever photo of a black hole, taken by an international collaboration of scientists called the Event Horizon Telescope.
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