“It is the cowardly lion of black holes,” said project scientist Geoffrey C. Scientists had expected the Milky Way’s black hole to be more violent, especially since the only other image from another galaxy shows a far bigger and more active black hole. She said the image of “my baby” is exactly how it should be - an eerie-looking orange-red ring with utter blackness in the middle. She wasn’t part of the telescope team bu t earned a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the Milky Way’s black hole in the 1990s. “Pictures of black holes are the hardest thing to think about,” said astronomer Andrea Ghez of the University of California, Los Angeles. It is about the size of the orbit of Mercury around our sun.īlack holes gobble up galactic material but Ozel said this one is “eating very little.” It’s the equivalent to a person eating a single grain of rice over millions of years, another astronomer said. The picture also confirms Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity: The black hole is precisely the size that Einstein’s equations dictate. She described it as a “gentle giant” while announcing the breakthrough along with other astronomers involved in the project. “It burbled and gurgled as we looked at it,” the University of Arizona’s Feryal Ozel said. Getting a good image was a challenge previous efforts found the black hole too jumpy. The colorized image unveiled Thursday is from an international consortium behind the Event Horizon Telescope, a collection of eight synchronized radio telescopes around the world. Light gets bent and twisted around by gravity as it gets sucked into the abyss along with superheated gas and dust. Supermassive black holes are also located very far away, which doesn't make matters easier.The world’s first image of the chaotic supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy doesn’t portray a voracious cosmic destroyer but what astronomers Thursday called a “gentle giant” on a near-starvation diet.Īstronomers believe nearly all galaxies, including our own, have these giant black holes at their bustling and crowded center, where light and matter cannot escape, making it extremely hard to get images of them. It's akin to having a circular mirror with all but a handful of tiny reflective patches ground away - making it hard to quickly generate a clear image. While the telescope is considered to be Earth-sized on a virtual level, its ability to gather radio waves from the center of the galaxy is limited. The EHT is seriously challenged in this regard, though. This also helps counteract noise introduced by hardware, which can drown out a tough-to-see object. On the physics side, Brandt said the operation is akin to taking a clear photo of a distant object in the dark: the longer the exposure, the more light and signal a camera can record, leading to a crisper image. The Event Horizon Telescope took more than a decade to reach this point in part because of physics, but also because of complexity and cost. The scale and hype of the announcement - six press conferences in multiple languages held simultaneously across Belgium, Chile, Shanghai, Japan, Taipei, and the US - strongly suggests that's the case.Īll of the participating observatories in the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration. No images of either galaxy's central and colossal black holes have yet been released, but that's expected to happen for the first time on Wednesday at 9 a.m. Because it's so much bigger, its event horizon should be roughly as visible as that of the Milky Way's own supermassive black hole. Although that's 2,000 times as distant as our own supermassive black hole, M87's is thought to be 2.7 to 7 billion solar masses in size. The second supermassive black hole resides inside an extremely large galaxy called Messier 87 (M87), which is about 53.5 million light-years away from us. It's about 26,000 light-years from Earth, which is cosmically close and makes it a workable target for EHT. The first, called Sagittarius A* (pronounced "A-star"), is at the center of our Milky Way galaxy and is thought to be as massive as 3.5 to 4.7 million suns. This helps researchers make out the details of two nearby supermassive black holes, so named because they can be millions if not billions of times as massive as stars like the sun. It often indicates a user profile.ĮHT is using observatories at 11 different locations to create a "virtual" radio telescope that's about the size of planet Earth. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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