It’s the closest we can get to imaging a black hole, which is an object with such a strong a gravitational field that no light or matter can escape,” said Dr Ziri Younsi (UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory), part of the EHT collaboration. “We have accomplished something many thought impossible by imaging the shadow of a black hole and it provides the strongest evidence to date that such evasive and enigmatic entities do indeed exist. It was achieved by a team of more than 200 researchers from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America.
#Event horizon telescope black hole series#
The EHT is an international collaboration specifically set up to image a black hole by linking eight ground-based radio telescopes globally to make an Earth-sized virtual telescope with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution.įollowing decades of observational, technical and theoretical work, the breakthrough was announced today in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. It has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun.Īlthough supermassive black holes are relatively tiny astronomical objects, this was predicted to be one of the largest viewable black holes from Earth, making it the perfect target for the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). Nestled at the heart of distant galaxy, Messier 87, which is 55 million light-years away in the Virgo galaxy cluster, the black hole measures just under 40 billion kilometres across, which is ~3 million times the diameter of the Earth. The first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow have been unveiled by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration involving UCL researchers. Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, " Out There (opens in new tab) " (Grand Central Publishing, 2018 illustrated by Karl Tate ), is out now.
The EHT project focuses on the two supermassive black holes that have the largest apparent event horizons, as seen from Earth: the one at the heart of our own Milky Way galaxy, known as Sagittarius A*, and the monster that anchors the giant elliptical galaxy M87. "Over the coming years, the international EHT team will mount observing campaigns of increasing resolving power and sensitivity, aiming to bring black holes into focus," the team added. "This capability would open a new window on the study of general relativity in the strong field regime, accretion and outflow processes at the edge of a black hole, the existence of event horizons, and fundamental black-hole physics," the EHT team wrote in a project description. (Directly imaging the black hole itself - the part inside the event horizon - from our perspective is, of course, impossible there are no photons from that exotic realm to catch.)
The goal is to generate enough magnifying power to image the area around a black hole, especially its event horizon - the point beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape. The project links up radio dishes around the globe, creating a virtual telescope about the size of Earth.
If you want to try to connect some dots, here's some basic information about the EHT. The advisory doesn't state what the April 10 announcement will be, but the above information suggests it's a pretty big deal.
0 kommentar(er)
