It is this light that the EHT detected, along with the “silhouette” of the black hole. Matter closer to the event horizon glows brilliantly bright with the heat of hundreds of Suns. The closer the matter, the greater the friction. This warms up the disk, just as we warm our hands on a cold day by rubbing them together. Matter in this disk will convert some of its energy to friction as it rubs against other particles of matter. When matter approaches a black hole’s event horizon – the point at which not even light can escape – it forms an orbiting disk. Not only are they able to emit huge jets of plasma, but their immense gravity pulls in streams of matter into its core. But thanks to Stephen Hawking’s groundbreaking work, we know that the colossal masses are not just black abysses. Against the black backdrop of the inky beyond, capturing one is a near impossible task. Capturing the uncapturableĪ black hole is a region of space whose mass is so large and dense that not even light can escape its gravitational attraction. ![]() To cut a long story short: Einstein was right. It’s an unprecedented test of whether Einstein’s ideas about the very nature of space and time hold up in extreme circumstances, and looks closer than ever before at the role of black holes in the universe. ![]() This amazing feat required global collaboration to turn the Earth into one giant telescope and image an object thousands of trillions of kilometres away.Īs stunning and ground-breaking as it is, the EHT project is not just about taking on a challenge. If you needed to see to believe, then thank the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which has just produced the first ever direct image of a black hole. But their Hollywood fame is a little strange given that no-one has ever actually seen one – at least, until now. "It's a wonderful time to be alive," he added.Black holes are long-time superstars of science fiction. If we're ever going to learn something that is completely unknown to us, it will be from doing something like studying black holes," Shep Doeleman, an astrophysicist at Harvard University and founding director of the EHT collaboration, told Insider ahead of Thursday's announcement. "Understanding black holes, at any level, addresses fundamental mysteries of the universe. A major astronomical mystery is how black holes and their galaxies evolve together. Scientists think every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, from the very early days of the galaxy's birth. ![]() "This tells us that general relativity governs these objects up close, and any differences we see further away must be due to differences in the material that surrounds the black holes," Markoff said. "We were all amazed that the image of Sagittarius A* looked so similar to the image of the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy," Sera Markoff, co-chair of the EHT Science Council and astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam, told reporters on Thursday. Xavier Barcons, director general of the European Southern Observatory, said at a press conference that the groundbreaking result is a timely reminder of what we can achieve when countries work together. Researchers took this stunning photo through the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an international collaboration that involves 300 international scientists and eight radio observatories around the world. That disk allows scientists to capture the black hole's silhouette, since the object swallows all forms of light, making it impossible to photograph directly. In the photo, a brilliant fuzzy ring of orange and yellow glows around a dark center - the accretion disk, a swirl of superheated material, circling the event horizon, where not even light can escape the black hole's gravity. Research institutions across the planet unveiled the picture in simultaneous press conferences on Thursday. Hundreds of scientists worked together to capture the first-ever image of the Milky Way's central black hole, called Sagittarius A* (pronounced "A-star"). ![]() For the first time, take a good look at the supermassive black hole churning at the center of our galaxy.
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