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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 HiThere on Thursday April 11 2019, @04:35PM
Yes. It certainly narrows the plausible alternatives. And it (so far) matches expected predictions. But there's a whole lot of assumptions involved in interpreting the data, and the resolution isn't that good. (Well, it would have been foolish to expect better, but still, ...)
So, AFAIKT, it's consistent with a black hole. But I think that there are still alternatives. (OTOH, I'm no specialist in that area. But I *do* know how PR types oversimplify science reporting, and turn estimates of probability into statements of certainty. And this applies to flacks working for NASA nearly as much as to anyone else. [Well, there are some I don't trust that much. The "oversimplifiers" are, I think, trying to avoid confusing or boring their audience.])
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.