![]() "What we see in the image is the shadow of the black hole's rim-known as the event horizon, or the point of no return-set against the luminous accretion disk," Gueth told AFP. Like a fidgety child, Sag A* was too "active" to capture a clear picture, the scientists said. ![]() "We only see pieces of the real true image, and then we have to fill in the gaps of the missing pieces." "The data is like an incomplete puzzle set," said team member Monika Moscibrodzka, an astronomer at Radboud University. 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.For more multimedia, visit NSF.gov/blackhole, including text-free versions of all images. 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. Knitted together, they formed a virtual observatory some 12,000 kilometres across-roughly the diameter of Earth. Over several days in April 2017, eight radio telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona, Spain, Mexico, Chile, and the South Pole zeroed in on Sag A* and M87. "Instead of constructing a giant telescope that would collapse under its own weight, we combined many observatories," Michael Bremer, an astronomer at the Institute for Millimetric Radio Astronomy (IRAM) in Grenoble, told AFP. Locking down an image of M87's supermassive black hole at such distance is comparable to photographing a pebble on the Moon, the scientists said. ![]() Most speculation had centred on the other candidate targeted by the Event Horizon Telescope: Sagittarius A*, a closer but smaller black hole at the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. "It's a distance that we could have barely imagined," Frederic Gueth, an astronomer at France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and co-author of studies detailing the findings, told AFP. The supermassive black hole immortalised by a far-flung network of radio telescopes is 50 million lightyears away at the centre of a galaxy known as M87. "The history of science will be divided into the time before the image, and the time after the image," said Michael Kramer, director at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.Ĭarlos Moedas, European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation called the feat a "huge breakthrough for humanity." The image of a dark core encircled by a flame-orange halo of white-hot plasma looks like any number of artists' renderings over the last 30 years.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |