Here it is, the first-ever image of a black hole
In the swirling heart of a distant galaxy, 55 million light-years from Earth, lies a supermassive black hole with a mass 6.5 billion times greater than that of our sun. “Making an image of a black hole doesn’t come easily, as many people can tell you,” said Shep Doeleman, an astrophysicist at Harvard University and project director of the global endeavor known as the Event Horizon Telescope. “You are seeing the gravitational well of the black hole.” Shep Doeleman, project director of the Event Horizon Telescope, unveils the historic black hole picture in Washington, D.C. Daniel Stern, a cosmologist who studies black hole formation at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, said he woke up at 6 a.m. to watch live as Doeleman unveiled the picture at a news conference in Washington, D.C. “It was phenomenal,” he said. The resolution of a radio telescope is directly proportional to its size, and in order to see the black hole’s event horizon, scientists needed a telescope with a dish roughly the size of Earth. “There was a lot of concern that they would only see a partial ring.” In April 2018, the Event Horizon Telescope team made additional observations of both M87’s supermassive black hole and Sagittarius A*.
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