11/28/2023 0 Comments Event horizon telescope picturesUnlike the beast powering M-87, Sgr A* is a relatively modest 4.3-million-solar-mass black hole filling a volume smaller than Earth’s solar system. The globe-spanning network of radio dishes, atomic clocks and computers making up the Event Horizon Telescope also is expected to image Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. The scale of the event was reminiscent of the announcements surrounding the discovery of the Higgs boson and the first detection of gravitational waves. The long-awaited announcement was made simultaneously at multiple news conferences around the world by scientists participating in the Event Horizon Telescope project. … The object at the heart of M-87 is a black hole like those described by general relativity.” Said Daniel Marrone, an astronomer at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory: “Today, general relativity has passed another crucial test. It is also consistent … with Einstein’s predictions.” This is the strongest evidence we have to date for the existence of black holes. “We now know that a black hole that weighs 6.5 billion times what our sun does exists in the center of M-87. “We now have visual evidence for a black hole,” Doeleman said. It closely resembles what astronomers expected based on simulations running the equations of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The image captured by the Event Horizon Telescope shows a black central core - the event horizon - surrounded by a lopsided ring of light emitted by particles racing around the black hole at nearly the speed of light. The black hole’s six-and-a-half billion solar masses are crammed into a region about the size of a solar system.Ī familiar target for amateur astronomers, M-87 is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky, featuring huge jets of material extending away from the core, powered by the voracious black hole. The target was an enormous 6.5-billion-solar-mass black hole in the core of M-87, a giant elliptical galaxy about 55 million light years away in the constellation Virgo. “We have seen, and taken a picture of, a black hole. “We are delighted to be able to report to you today that we have seen what we thought was unseeable,” said Sheperd Doeleman, a radio astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and director of the Event Horizon Telescope project. Credit: EHT CollaborationĪ century after Einstein’s equations predicted the existence of black holes, a virtual telescope the size of planet Earth has captured the first direct image of a black hole, or rather the mysterious region defined by the hole’s event horizon, the point beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape, astronomers announced Wednesday. In coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the centre of Messier 87 and its shadow. STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) - 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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