“The first image of a black hole, captured in 2019, has revealed more support for Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity,” reports CNN, adding that the new finding suggests his theory is now 500 times harder to beat. [W]hile light can’t escape the inside of a black hole, it’s possible for light to make a getaway in a region around the…
Tag: EHT
The Only Black Hole We’ve Ever Seen Has a Shadow That Wobbles
The supermassive black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy has a shadow crescent that moves, like a dancer in the dark. From a report: Over a year ago, scientists unleashed something incredible on the world: the first photo of a black hole ever taken. By putting together radio astronomy observations made with dishes across four continents, the collaboration known…
Something is lurking in the heart of Quasar 3C 279
One year ago, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration published the first image of a black hole in the nearby radio galaxy M 87. Now the collaboration has extracted new information from the EHT data on the distant quasar 3C 279: they observed the finest detail ever seen in a jet produced by a supermassive black hole. New analyses, led by…
‘Infinite subrings’ may be next frontier for photographing black holes
Black-hole photography could be even more powerful and revelatory than scientists had thought. Source: https://www.livescience.com/supermassive-black-hole-photon-ring-eht-photo.html
Research team discovers path to razor-sharp black hole images
Last April, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) sparked international excitement when it unveiled the first image of a black hole. Today, a team of researchers have published new calculations that predict a striking and intricate substructure within black hole images from extreme gravitational light bending. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-03-team-path-razor-sharp-black-hole.html…
NASA’s space geodesy project mapping out a bright future
In April 2019, an international team of more than 300 scientists unveiled the first recorded images of a black hole, its dark shadow and vivid orange disk peering back across 55 million light years of space. Capturing images from so far away required the combined power of eight radio telescopes across four continents, working together to essentially form a massive Earth-sized…
First Ever Black Hole Image Earns Researchers a $3 Million Prize
The team of researchers that captured the first direct image of a black hole was honored with an “Oscar of Science” — the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. Source: https://www.livescience.com/breakthrough-prize-2019-eht-black-hole.html
The giant galaxy around the giant black hole
On April 10, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) unveiled the first-ever image of a black hole’s event horizon, the area beyond which light cannot escape the immense gravity of the black hole. That giant black hole, with a mass of 6.5 billion Suns, is located in the elliptical galaxy Messier 87 (M87). EHT is an international collaboration whose support in…
Why Does the First Picture of a Black Hole Look Like a SpaghettiO?
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is circling the cosmic drain. A vast and inescapable void pulses at its center, devouring all energy and matter in its path—a black hole. Astronomers believe that nearly every galaxy circles these voids, in fact, but nobody has ever seen one until today. On Wednesday, an international team of scientists… Continue reading Why Does the First Picture of a Black Hole Look Like a SpaghettiO?
This Is the First-Ever Photo of a Black Hole
You’ve heard of black holes, probably a million times in your life. They’re these wild things in outer space that eat light and sometimes each other, creating ripples in space-time, and there’s probably even one right in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. But in the century since Albert Einstein theorized the existence of black… Continue reading This Is the First-Ever Photo of a Black Hole