Real black hole picture series#

The presence of these objects affects their environment in extreme ways, warping spacetime and super-heating any surrounding material. If you’ve got some time, you can also check out this morning’s announcement via this replay of the press conference:Īnd here’s more from a statement from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT):īlack holes are extraordinary cosmic objects with enormous masses but extremely compact sizes. This is an extraordinary scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers. We have taken the first picture of a black hole. Doeleman of the Harvard-Smithsionian Center for Astrophysics said in a statement: What a science journalist's Tweetdeck looks like right now /6bJxaOc22rĮvent Horizon Telescope project director Sheperd S.

All the images you’ve ever seen of them have been computer simulations or artist’s conceptions, until now. Although black holes have been studied for decades, they’ve been largely theoretical objects. To say it is a big deal for astronomers is an understatement.

Real black hole picture series#

This breakthrough was announced April 10 in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. To obtain the image, astronomers used the Event Horizon Telescope ( on Twitter) – a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes – designed specifically to capture the first-ever black hole photo. This black hole, by the way, at M87’s heart, is thought to be some 6.5 billion times more massive than our sun. Instead, the image shows what astronomers are calling the black hole’s “shadow,” a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around the hole. The image doesn’t show the black hole itself black holes are black because no light can escape them, and thus the holes themselves are invisible. The astronomers said it presents “paradigm-shifting” observations of the gargantuan black hole in the center of the galaxy M87, 55 million light-years from Earth.

The image (above) is the result of a multi-year, international collaboration. On April 10, 2019, in coordinated press conferences around the world, researchers unveiled the first direct visual evidence – a photo, albeit in the “light” of radio waves – of a supermassive black hole. Image via Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. This long-sought image provides the strongest evidence to date for the existence of supermassive black holes and opens a new window onto the study of black holes, their event horizons, and gravity. It’s the 1st radio image of a black hole, in the galaxy M87.