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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.
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 is the result of years of international collaboration, and offers scientists a new way to study the most extreme objects in the Universe predicted by Einstein's general relativity during the centennial year of the historic experiment that first confirmed the theory.
[...] This research was presented in a series of six papers published today in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, along with a Focus Issue:
- Paper I: The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole
- Paper II: Array and Instrumentation
- Paper III: Data processing and Calibration
- Paper IV: Imaging the Central Supermassive Black Hole
- Paper V: Physical Origin of the Asymmetric Ring
- Paper VI: The Shadow and Mass of the Central Black Hole
Press release images in higher resolution (4000x2330 pixels) can be found here in PNG (16-bit), and JPG (8-bit) format. The highest-quality image (7416x4320 pixels, TIF, 16-bit, 180 Mb) can be obtained from repositories of our partners, NSF and ESO. A summary of latest press and media resources can be found on this page.
Also at Ars Technica.
(Score: 2) by tizan on Wednesday April 10 2019, @09:38PM (2 children)
A black hole has an event horizon (hence the name of the radio array used to image this).
We know for decades now that there is something massive and compact at the centre of galaxies ... And the only thing that can be that massive and compact can be black holes...where nothing can escape once they cross the event horizon. There are other theries out there (e.g MOND) that try to explain the mass and motion of stars in galaxies...Black holes is the only one that has withstood all observations so far.
This is the first observation at a resolution where you can distinguish the event horizon.
Does that make sense now why this is kind of very important ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @09:50PM
I think you are confusing black holes and "dark matter".
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Wednesday April 10 2019, @10:56PM
>And the only thing that can be that massive and compact can be black holes
Assuming of course, that our known-flawed laws of physics are accurate.
It would be more accurate to say that we don't currently know of any forces strong enough to keep something sufficiently massive from collapsing into a singularity once sufficient angular momentum has been dissipated, assuming General Relativity is correct.
But we would be deep into extreme high energy QM, far beyond what we have actually been able to explore, before an event horizon was formed. There's also a proposed variation of GR that treats gravitational field energy the same way as all other energy fields, in terms of the energy field producing it's own gravitational pull, which renders black holes impossible due to the "pullback" of the gravity from the incredibly energy-dense gravitational field around an ultradense not-quite-a-black-hole. Einstein dismissed the idea as double-counting the effect of the central mass, but there's currently no evidence either way, unless this new photo provides it.