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Apr 10, 2019 · See the first picture of a black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope. Learn what a black hole is, how it forms, and how it affects its surroundings.
May 12, 2022 · The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, led by Harvard scientists, reveals the first direct image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. The image confirms Einstein's theory of relativity and shows how black holes shape galaxies.
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Using a telescope the size of the planet, astronomers have captured the first image of this space oddity. Here's why that matters.
More than 50 million light-years away, in the heart of a giant elliptical galaxy called Messier 87, a gargantuan beast is devouring anything that strays too near. Stars, planets, gas, and dust—not even light escapes the monster’s grasp once it crosses a threshold called the event horizon.
Today, scientists unveiled an image of that object, a supermassive black hole containing the same mass as 6.5 billion suns. Resembling a circular void surrounded by a lopsided ring of light, this landmark image is the world’s first glimpse of a black hole’s silhouette, a picture that creeps right up to the inescapable edge of the black hole’s maw.
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The new image is the stunning achievement of the Event Horizon Telescope project, a global collaboration of more than 200 scientists using an array of observatories scattered around the world, from Hawaii to the South Pole. Combined, this array acts like a telescope the size of Earth, and it was able to collect more than a petabyte of data while staring at M87’s black hole in April 2017. It then took two years for scientists to assemble the mugshot.
Before now, humans could only see indirect evidence that black holes even existed by looking for stars that seemed to orbit bizarre objects, by capturing radiation from the superheated matter swirling into them, or by seeing the extremely energetic jets of particles launched from their tumultuous environments. (Recently, astronomers caught their first glimpse of what seems to be a star becoming a black hole.)
The Event Horizon Telescope initially set out to snag an image of the supermassive black hole at the core of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Called Sagittarius A*, that black hole is relatively puny compared to M87, containing the mass of just four million suns. Because M87 is one of the nearest, biggest black holes, the team also decided to aim the telescope there, hoping to eventually compare the two bruisers.
Seeing into the heart of our galaxy turned out to be a bit more complicated than staring down the barrel of a black hole in the next galaxy cluster over, which is why M87’s portrait is out first.
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Over its lifetime, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured many stunning images. Among the most memorable is this edge-on mosaic of the Sombrero galaxy . With its relatively high brightness magnitude and at a distance of 28 million light-years from Earth, Messier 104, as Sombrero is more formally known, is easily viewed through a small telescope.
Over its lifetime, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured many stunning images. Among the most memorable is this edge-on mosaic of the Sombrero galaxy. With its relatively high brightness magnitude and at a distance of 28 million light-years from Earth, Messier 104, as Sombrero is more formally known, is easily viewed through a small telescope.
Photograph courtesy NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
To resolve these supermassive black holes—which are tiny compared to their surrounding galaxies—the consortium needed to harness the power of radio telescopes all over the planet. In the end, six observatories in Mexico, Hawaii, Arizona, Chile, and Spain aimed their eyes into sky and stared at M87, which is the biggest galaxy in the center of the Virgo cluster. Functioning as one Earth-sized telescope, the network can resolve objects just one-ten thousandth the angular size of what Hubble can see.
With the image in hand, scientists can now start to probe some of the deeper mysteries of the physics of black holes, including confirming their foundational underpinnings.
“What we’d really like to know from these observations is, are the properties of these black holes really what we expect if Einstein is right?” Rees says.
No one really knows what, if anything, is at the core of a black hole, called the singularity. This puncture in the very fabric of the universe is surrounded by a curved, exotic expanse of space-time from which nothing escapes.
However, the new image should help astronomers hoping to understand more about the outside of M87, especially its fountains of extremely energetic particles traveling at nearly the speed of light. Spanning about 4,900 light-years, M87’s visible jet is one of the more eye-catching spectacles in the nearby universe.
A black hole blasting matter into space might sound paradoxical, given that they generally tend to inhale matter, but these exotic objects are nothing if not baffling.
“It seems like they are just as good at pushing material away—jets, winds, and outflows—as they are at collecting material,” says Daryl Haggard of McGill University, noting that scientists really have no clear idea about how black holes actually power jets.
Seeing the interface between light, matter, and M87’s event horizon might help scientists work out this enigmatic process. Multiple observatories previously aimed their eyes at the black hole and tried to untangle the engine behind its jet, studying it in wavelengths spanning the electromagnetic spectrum.
Such jets seem to originate from the disk of matter swirling around the event horizon, in a region called the ergosphere, Markoff says. Here, space-time never stands still and is perpetually rotating. It’s an environment characterized by intense magnetic field lines, gases heated to millions of degrees, and particles zipping around almost impossibly quickly. Interactions between those elements on microscopic scales somehow unleash the enormous power contained in the jets.
See the stunning image of a supermassive black hole and its shadow, captured by a global network of radio telescopes. Learn how this landmark achievement reveals the mass, shape, and jets of this cosmic monster.
Apr 10, 2019 · NASA spacecraft and ground-based radio telescopes coordinated to study the shadow of a supermassive black hole in M87 galaxy. The image reveals the hot disk of material around the black hole and the origin of its jet, and may help solve mysteries about black holes.
May 12, 2022 · published 12 May 2022. See the first photo of the Milky Way's black hole Sagittarius A* and how it was made. On May 12, 2022, scientists unveiled the first-ever image of Sagittarius A*, the...
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Apr 10, 2019 · Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole's shadow, using a network of radio telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope. NASA spacecraft observed the black hole in different wavelengths of light, to study its jet, disk and environment.
May 12, 2022 · The new image of Sgr A* follows the first-ever image of a black hole, which was obtained by the EHT in 2019. That groundbreaking image was of M87*, the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87, a galaxy located 53 million light years from Earth.
