![]() ![]() ![]() The supermassive black hole now immortalised by a far-flung network of radio telescopes is 50 million light-years away in a galaxy known as M87. What Is a Black Hole? Searching for What Can't Be Seen Scientists have been puzzling over invisible "dark stars" since the 18th century, but never has one been spied by a telescope, much less photographed. On Wednesday, years-long work by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration was unveiled. The image of a dark core encircled by a flame-orange halo of white-hot gas and plasma looks like any number of artists' renderings over the last 30 years. Supermassive black holes are also located very far away, which doesn't make matters easier.Astronomers on Wednesday unveiled the first image of a black hole, one of the star-devouring monsters scattered throughout the Universe and obscured by impenetrable shields of gravity. ![]() It's akin to having a circular mirror with all but a handful of tiny reflective patches ground away - making it hard to quickly generate a clear image. While the telescope is considered to be Earth-sized on a virtual level, its ability to gather radio waves from the center of the galaxy is limited. The EHT is seriously challenged in this regard, though. ![]() This also helps counteract noise introduced by hardware, which can drown out a tough-to-see object. On the physics side, Brandt said the operation is akin to taking a clear photo of a distant object in the dark: the longer the exposure, the more light and signal a camera can record, leading to a crisper image. The Event Horizon Telescope took more than a decade to reach this point in part because of physics, but also because of complexity and cost. The scale and hype of the announcement - six press conferences in multiple languages held simultaneously across Belgium, Chile, Shanghai, Japan, Taipei, and the US - strongly suggests that's the case.Īll of the participating observatories in the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration. No images of either galaxy's central and colossal black holes have yet been released, but that's expected to happen for the first time on Wednesday at 9 a.m. Because it's so much bigger, its event horizon should be roughly as visible as that of the Milky Way's own supermassive black hole. Although that's 2,000 times as distant as our own supermassive black hole, M87's is thought to be 2.7 to 7 billion solar masses in size. The second supermassive black hole resides inside an extremely large galaxy called Messier 87 (M87), which is about 53.5 million light-years away from us. It's about 26,000 light-years from Earth, which is cosmically close and makes it a workable target for EHT. The first, called Sagittarius A* (pronounced "A-star"), is at the center of our Milky Way galaxy and is thought to be as massive as 3.5 to 4.7 million suns. This helps researchers make out the details of two nearby supermassive black holes, so named because they can be millions if not billions of times as massive as stars like the sun. It often indicates a user profile.ĮHT is using observatories at 11 different locations to create a "virtual" radio telescope that's about the size of planet Earth. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. ![]()
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