![]() Then, in 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) - a collaboration of radio telescopes around the globe - released the first ever image of a black hole: the central black hole of the galaxy M87 (or M87*), about 53 million light-years from Earth. Until recently, however, this had never been seen. The black hole bends light rays around it and absorbs light that strays too close, casting a shadow against the disk. Simulations show that the disk of gas around the singularity heats up and begins to glow just before it crosses the event horizon. Since the 1990s, astronomers have observed stars at the center of our galaxy, roughly 27,000 light-years away, whipping around an object that appears to have the gravitational pull of 4 million Suns.īut obtaining a direct image of a black hole itself is a lot harder. But astronomers have been able to study them by observing their gravitational influence on stars around them. The “hole” itself - a singularity in spacetime - remains invisible. A globe-spanning telescopeīlack holes are the theorized accumulations of matter that are so dense, not even light can escape the grasp of their gravity. The team published their results today in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “It took several years to refine our image and confirm what we had,” said Feryal Özel, an astronomer at the University of Arizona in Tucson, at the NSF press conference. The image represents 3.5 million gigabytes of data taken at millimeter wavelengths by eight radio telescopes around the world. The black hole is named Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”), and the reveal of its image received an international rollout this morning in simultaneous press conferences held by the National Science Foundation (NSF) at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and the European Southern Observatory headquarters in Garching, Germany. In a triumph of observation and data processing, astronomers at the Event Horizon Telescope have captured the first ever picture of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.
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