Submitted via IRC for boru
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 Immerman on Wednesday April 10 2019, @10:14PM (1 child)
Why do you say that? Everything I see says it's a low-energy microwave (1.3mm) spectrum image, not a data visualization diagram.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @10:40PM
It is the result of passing a bunch of messy data through an elaborate processing pipeline:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0c57 [iop.org]
Eg, here are four different images they generated:
https://cdn.iopscience.com/images/2041-8205/875/1/L4/Full/apjlab0e85f4_lr.jpg [iopscience.com]
Here she explains they even plug in images of what a black hole "should look like" as part of generating the image:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7n2rYt9wfU [youtube.com]