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. 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.
Above – scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun. 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. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, Photo credits to: Andrew Chael wrote over 850,000 lines of the 900,000 lines of code and Katie Bouman and others.
This breakthrough was announced today in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun.
The EHT links telescopes around the globe to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution.
The EHT observations use a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) which synchronises telescope facilities around the world and exploits the rotation of our planet to form one huge, Earth-size telescope observing at a wavelength of 1.3 mm. VLBI allows the EHT to achieve an angular resolution of 20 micro-arcseconds — enough to read a newspaper in New York from a sidewalk café in Paris.
The telescopes contributing to this result were ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-meter telescope, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano, the Submillimeter Array, the Submillimeter Telescope, and the South Pole Telescope. Petabytes of raw data from the telescopes were combined by highly specialized supercomputers hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory.
A map of the EHT. Stations active in 2017 and 2018 are shown with connecting lines and labeled in yellow, sites in commission are labeled in green, and legacy sites are labeled in red. From Paper II
The shadow of a black hole is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across.
The Astrophysical Journal Letters – Focus on the First Event Horizon Telescope Results
his work signals the development of a new field of research in astronomy and physics as we zero in on precision images of black holes on horizon scales. The prospects for sharpening our focus even further are excellent.
First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. I. The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole
The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration et al. 2019 ApJL 875 L1
First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. II. Array and Instrumentation
The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration et al. 2019 ApJL 875 L2
First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. III. Data Processing and Calibration
The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration et al. 2019 ApJL 875 L3
First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. IV. Imaging the Central Supermassive Black Hole
The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration et al. 2019 ApJL 875 L4
First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. V. Physical Origin of the Asymmetric Ring
The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration et al. 2019 ApJL 875 L5
First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. VI. The Shadow and Mass of the Central Black Hole
The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration et al. 2019 ApJL 875 L6
SOURCES- Event Horizon Telescope Project, The Astrophysical Journal Letters
Written by Brian Wang from press release and research paper
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maybe it’s easier to detect, or “see” a supermassive than something a lot closer like V616 which is only a stellar black hole and 3k light years away. Read something about the difficulty of seeing what is essentially unseeable.
This seems like a big deal. Hopefully some observable objects are closer than 55M light years as mentioned. Horses had 5 toes when this light was emitted.
Glazed donut.