But the photo shows more than that: Surrounding the shadow is a bright, fiery ring of light.įeryal Özel is an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona and an EHT collaborator. And, sure enough, at the center of the EHT’s image is the dark blob of the black hole itself, which astronomers often call its shadow. That means a black hole is literally black - it neither gives off nor reflects any light. The objects are so massive and dense that not even light can escape their pull. (Just eight observatories were part of the EHT in 2017, when researchers first gathered the image data.) The scientists then spent two years analyzing and formatting it before they could unveil the finished picture.Ī photo of a black hole, at first, seems impossible. The EHT fit the bill, with its network of nearly a dozen independent observatories across the globe, cooperating as one enormous detector. Despite its size, the black hole is so far from Earth - 55 million light-years - that capturing the image required a telescope the size of our planet. The subject of the photo session was a nearby galaxy, dubbed M87, and its supermassive black hole, which packs the mass of 6.5 billion suns.
#Blackhole picture series
The team of scientists made their announcement simultaneously in seven different countries, accompanied by a series of scientific papers published at the same time in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “We are delighted to be able to report to you today that we have seen what we thought was unseeable,” said Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) founding director Shep Doeleman when he announced the finding in April. A staple of science fiction has finally become visibly real. The image offers humanity its first glimpse of the gas and debris that swirl around the object’s event horizon, the point beyond which material disappears forever. This spring, astronomers revealed the first image ever taken of a black hole, bringing a decades-long effort to a dramatic conclusion.
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