![]() ![]() "If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowing gas, we expect a black hole to create a dark region similar to a shadow - something predicted by Einstein's general relativity that we've never seen before, explained chair of the EHT Science Council Heino Falcke of Radboud University, the Netherlands. The presence of these objects affects their environment in extreme ways, warping spacetime and super-heating any surrounding material. "This is an extraordinary scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers."īlack holes are extraordinary cosmic objects with enormous masses but extremely compact sizes. Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian. "We have taken the first picture of a black hole," said EHT project director Sheperd S. The EHT is the result of years of international collaboration, and offers scientists a new way to study the most extreme objects in the Universe predicted by Einstein's general relativity during the centennial year of the historic experiment that first confirmed the theory. The EHT links telescopes around the globe to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution. ![]() This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This breakthrough was announced today in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow. 10 April 2019: 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.Over the coming years, the international EHT team will mount observing campaigns of increasing resolving power and sensitivity, aiming to bring black holes into focus.Īstronomers Capture First Image of a Black Hole The EHT project includes theoretical and simulation studies that are framing questions rooted at the black hole boundary that may soon be answered through observations.īy linking together existing telescopes using novel systems, the EHT leverages considerable global investment to create a fundamentally new instrument with an angular resolving power that is the highest possible from the surface of the Earth. Addition of key millimeter and submillimeter wavelength facilities at high altitude sites has now opened the possibility of imaging such features and sensing the dynamic evolution of black hole accretion. In both cases, the sizes match that of the predicted silhouette caused by the extreme lensing of light by the black hole. This technique of linking radio dishes across the globe to create an Earth-sized interferometer, has been used to measure the size of the emission regions of the two supermassive black holes with the largest apparent event horizons: SgrA* (Sagittarius A*) at the center of the Milky Way and M87 (Messier 87) in the center of the Virgo A galaxy. The EHT (Event Horizon Telescope) is an international collaboration that has formed to continue the steady long-term progress on improving the capability of VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) at short wavelengths in pursuit of this goal. This capability would open a new window on the study of general relativity in the strong field regime, accretion and outflow processes at the edge of a black hole, the existence of event horizons, and fundamental black hole physics. Such observations could lead to images of strong gravity effects that are expected near a black hole, and to the direct detection of dynamics near the black hole as matter orbits at near light speeds. Astronomy and Telescopes Black Hole and its Shadow - first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black holeįirst Image of a Black Hole Some context on Black Holes Einsteins Theory Tested Status ReferencesĪ long standing goal in astrophysics is to directly observe the immediate environment of a black hole with an angular resolution comparable to the event horizon.
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