Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
As promised a week ago, the results of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project have been unveiled to the world, showing the first ever photograph of a supermassive black hole.
The picture above, which you can find a full-resolution version of on the National Science Foundation`s (NSF) website (183.3MB TIF), shows a black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87). The black hole, located 55 million light years from Earth, is 6 billion times more massive than our Sun and 1,500 times more massive than Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the black hole at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
The black disk at the center of the image is a shadow of the event horizon. Surrounding it is an orange glow made up of hot gas that`s managed to escape the strong gravitational pull of the black hole. In the words of the NSF, who helped to fund the EHT Project, the image is `not simulation or conjecture, but chaotic photons surrounding an unimaginable void.`
From Brussels: `Finally! No more simulations. You are looking for the very first time, at a real black hole.` #EHTblackhole #realblackhole #blackholecam pic.twitter.com/HH3m4v3fHH
- Event Horizon `Scope (@ehtelescope) April 10, 2019
The data used to create the image was captured in a week`s time back in April 2017 with the help of eight different radio telescopes across five continents, but it`s taken until now to gather, process and review that data. As noted by The Verge, Davide Castelvecchi of Nature News wrote back in 2017 that `A typical night will yield about as much data as a year´s worth of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, Switzerland.`
Below is a video explainer of the EHT project and its mission.
Once all of the data was captured from the eight telescopes across the globe, the data had to be physically sent to centralized locations where it was parsed through by a supercomputer for months on end to cr ...
|
