“This makes us confident about the interpretation of our observations, including our estimation of the black hole’s mass.” Ho, EHT Board member and Director of the East Asian Observatory 5. Many of the features of the observed image match our theoretical understanding surprisingly well,” remarked Paul T.P. "Once we were sure we had imaged the shadow, we could compare our observations to extensive computer models that include the physics of warped space, superheated matter and strong magnetic fields.
Multiple calibration and imaging methods have revealed a ring-like structure with a dark central region - the black hole’s shadow - that persisted over multiple independent EHT observations. “This shadow, caused by the gravitational bending and capture of light by the event horizon, reveals a lot about the nature of these fascinating objects and allowed us to measure the enormous mass of M87’s black hole.” “If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowing gas, we expect a black hole to create a dark region similar to a shadow - something predicted by Einstein’s general relativity that we’ve never seen before,” explained chair of the EHT Science Council Heino Falcke of Radboud University, the Netherlands. The presence of these objects affects their environment in extreme ways, warping spacetime and super-heating any surrounding material. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Professor of Physics and Astronomy Charles Gammie, a member of the EHT Science Council Board, co-led the theory working group and served as co-coordinator of Paper V, focused on the theoretical interpretation of the EHT data.īlack holes are extraordinary cosmic objects with enormous masses but extremely compact sizes.
Blackhole image series#
This breakthrough was announced today in a series of six papers published in a special issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. "This is an extraordinary scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers." Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. "We have taken the first picture of a black hole," said EHT project director Sheperd S. 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 4. The EHT links telescopes around the globe to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution 3. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun 2. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87 (M87) 1, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. Today, in coordinated press conferences around the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow. 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.
0 kommentar(er)
