Thanks #makeup and the skills of girls that know wtf they are doing. #oneyearago #selfie #tybaca (at Pomona, California) https://www.instagram.com/p/CCU_tCbJAVL6iqm9oQNZsNWBmeCbhzLsF4bztM0/?igshid=ioaoca0uq88r
The Event Horizon Telescope imaged the supermassive beast lying some 55 million light-years away in a galaxy called M87.
This is what a black hole looks like.
A black hole isn’t really a hole. It’s an object in space with incredible mass packed into a very small area. All that mass creates such a huge gravitational tug that nothing can escape a black hole, including light.
Explainer: What are black holes?
The newly imaged supermassive monster lies in a galaxy called M87. A world-spanning network of observatories called the Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT, zoomed in on M87 to create this first-ever picture of a black hole.
“We have seen what we thought was unseeable,” Sheperd Doeleman said April 10 in Washington, D.C. “We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole,” he reported at one of seven concurrent news conferences. Doeleman is EHT’s director. He also is an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. Results from his team’s work appear in six papers in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The concept of a black hole was first hinted at back in the 1780s. The mathematics behind them came from Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity. And the phenomenon got its name “black hole” in the 1960s. But until now, all “pictures” of black holes have been illustrations or simulations.
“We’ve been studying black holes so long, sometimes it’s easy to forget that none of us have actually seen one.”— France Córdova, director of the National Science Foundation
“We’ve been studying black holes so long, sometimes it’s easy to forget that none of us have actually seen one,” France Córdova said in the Washington, D.C., news conference. She is director of the National Science Foundation. Seeing a black hole “is a Herculean task,” she said.
That’s because black holes are famously hard to see. Their gravity is so extreme that nothing, not even light, can escape across the boundary at a black hole’s edge. That edge is known as the event horizon. But some black holes, especially supermassive ones dwelling in galaxies’ centers, stand out. They gather bright disks of gas and other material that surrounds the black hole. The EHT image reveals the shadow of M87’s black hole on its accretion disk. That disk looks like a fuzzy, asymmetrical ring. It unveils for the first time the dark abyss of one of the universe’s most mysterious objects.
The galaxy M87 sits about 55 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. Unlike the Milky Way’s stunning spirals, M87 is a blobby giant elliptical galaxy. The Event Horizon Telescope just took the first image of the black hole at the center of M87.
CHRIS MIHOS/CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIV., ESO
“It’s been such a buildup,” Doeleman said. “It was just astonishment and wonder… to know that you’ve uncovered a part of the universe that was off limits to us.”
The much-anticipated big reveal of the image “lives up to the hype, that’s for sure,” says Priyamvada Natarajan. This astrophysicist at Yale University, in New Haven, Conn., is not on the EHT team. “It really brings home how fortunate we are as a species at this particular time, with the capacity of the human mind to comprehend the universe, to have built all the science and technology to make it happen.”
