{"id":18092,"date":"2019-04-10T22:16:15","date_gmt":"2019-04-10T14:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/scientists-unveil-event-horizon-telescopes-first-image-of-a-galaxys-monster-black-hole\/"},"modified":"2019-04-10T22:16:15","modified_gmt":"2019-04-10T14:16:15","slug":"scientists-unveil-event-horizon-telescopes-first-image-of-a-galaxys-monster-black-hole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/scientists-unveil-event-horizon-telescopes-first-image-of-a-galaxys-monster-black-hole\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists unveil Event Horizon Telescope\u2019s first image of a galaxy\u2019s monster black hole"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_491156\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-491156\" style=\"width: 600px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-491156\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/190410-m87.jpg\" alt=\"M87 black hole event horizon\" width=\"600\" height=\"350\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/190410-m87.jpg 600w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/190410-m87-300x175.jpg 300w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/190410-m87-200x117.jpg 200w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/190410-m87-150x88.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\"><figcaption data-nosnippet=\"\" id=\"caption-attachment-491156\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">This image from the Event Horizon Telescope shows the supermassive black hole in the elliptical galaxy M87, surrounded by superheated material. (EHT Collaboration)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>WASHINGTON, D.C. \u2014 Scientists today shared the first picture to show the immediate surroundings of a galaxy\u2019s supermassive black hole, captured by a network of radio telescopes that adds up to what could be considered the world\u2019s widest observatory.<\/p>\n<p>A project called the Event Horizon Telescope delivered a fuzzy view of the dark monster at the center of an elliptical galaxy known as M87. The edge of the black hole\u2019s dark circle, known as the event horizon, was surrounded by the bright glare of superheated material falling into the black hole.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is a remarkable achievement. \u2026 It\u2019s almost humbling in a certain way,\u201d EHT project director Shep Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said during a news briefing here at the National Press Club.<\/p>\n<p>Even France Cordova, director of the National Science Foundation, was impressed.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is the first time that I saw this image right now \u2026 and it did bring tears to my eyes,\u201d she said. \u201cSo this is a very big deal.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>NSF provided streaming-video coverage of today\u2019s big reveal. Scientists in Europe and Japan streamed separate briefings in Brussels and Tokyo. Still more news conferences took place in Chile, China and Taiwan. The details were laid out in six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.<\/p>\n<p>The Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT, is actually an consortium of radio telescope facilities that are combining efforts to do what none of them could do on their own: chart the bright halo of hot material that surrounds a black hole\u2019s event horizon.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c\u201cWe have seen what we thought was unseeable,\u201d Doeleman said.<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"[Black Holes Explained] First EVER observed (M87*)\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/xsnjYC64RqA?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen=\"\" data-ratio=\"0.5625\" data-width=\"800\" data-height=\"450\" style=\"display: block; margin: 0px; width: 800px; height: 450px;\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>As any science-fiction fan knows, black holes are concentrated areas of gravitational collapse so massive that nothing \u2014 not even light \u2014 can escape their pull.<\/p>\n<p>If a dying star is massive enough, on the order of 10 or 20 times as massive as our sun, it\u2019s likely to collapse into a black hole when it dies. But the biggest black holes are the ones that form at the center of galaxies as they evolve. These supermassive monsters can weigh millions or even billions of times as much as our sun<\/p>\n<p>Our own Milky Way galaxy has just such a black hole at its core. Fortunately, our galaxy\u2019s supermassive black hole is on the quiet side.<\/p>\n<p>In April 2017, eight radio telescope facilities that are participating in the Event Horizon Telescope project took a close look at our galaxy\u2019s central region, known as Sagittarius A* (that is, Sagittarius A-star, abbreviated as Sgr A*). The team also tried capturing an image of the supermassive black hole at the center of M87, about 55 million light-years from Earth.<\/p>\n<p>The EHT facilities were in Arizona, Hawaii, Mexico, Chile, Spain and even the South Pole. Results from any one of the telescopes wouldn\u2019t have anywhere near the resolution to make out the hot surroundings of the black hole.<\/p>\n<p>To bring the picture into focus, the Event Horizon Telescope\u2019s teammates had to combine their observations using a technique known as very long baseline interferometry, or VLBI. The technique for synchronizing observations effectively turns their network into a huge radio telescope almost as wide as our planet.<\/p>\n<p>The image released today shows the radio signature of M87\u2019s black hole, which is about 23.6 billion miles wide \u2014 more than four times as wide as the orbit of Neptune \u2014 and 6.5 billion times more massive than our sun. As big as it is, spotting the black hole from tens of billions of light-years away was a challenge.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s the equivalent of being able to read the date on a quarter in Los Angeles when we\u2019re standing right here in D.C.,\u201d Doeleman said.<\/p>\n<p>Based on the pattern of light surrounding the black hole, scientists could even figure out that it\u2019s spinning clockwise.<\/p>\n<p>M87\u2019s black hole was easier to spot than our own galaxy\u2019s black hole because it\u2019s in more of an active state. But if it were too active, the superheated gas surrounding the black hole would have been too bright to see the event horizon\u2019s dark circle.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe just got lucky,\u201d&nbsp;said Sera Markoff, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam who is a member of the EHT Science Council.<\/p>\n<p>Doeleman said the team was still working to produce an image of Sagittarius A*, but the task is more complex than it is for M87.<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"Event Horizon Telescope Animated Movie\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/hMsNd1W_lmE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen=\"\" data-ratio=\"0.5625\" data-width=\"800\" data-height=\"450\" style=\"display: block; margin: 0px; width: 800px; height: 450px;\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Avery Broderick, a theoretical physicist at Canada\u2019s Perimeter Institute and the University of Waterloo, noted that the circular shape of the event horizon was totally consistent with Albert Einstein\u2019s theory of general relativity.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cToday, general relativity has passed another crucial test, this one spanning from horizons to the stars,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>University of Washington astronomer Eric Agol played a key role in suggesting VLBI as a way to view the \u201cshadows\u201d of supermassive black holes back in 1999.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s taken a lot longer than we expected, but it\u2019s a really amazing technical accomplishment,\u201d Agol, who isn\u2019t on the EHT team, told GeekWire by telephone after seeing the picture for the first time. \u201cAnd the image is pretty amazing as well.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>White House science adviser Kelvin Droegemeier said he ranked the Event Horizon Telescope\u2019s image right up there with the Nobel-winning first detection of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO. Even people who may not understand the physics of black holes \u201cknow it\u2019s really, really cool,\u201d Droegemeier told GeekWire.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThese are just singular moments in history,\u201d he said. \u201cWe as humans need this.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The picture of M87\u2019s black hole wasn\u2019t nearly as sharp as the depictions of black holes you\u2019ve seen in movies such as \u201cInterstellar.\u201d With a limited number of participating telescopes, even VLBI can take you only so far.<\/p>\n<p>Fortunately, more telescopes have joined the campaign over the past couple of years, and astronomers are working on ways to improve their data processing methods at different wavelengths. \u201cWe also want to go into space,\u201d Doeleman said, by launching an observatory that could be added to the Event Horizon Telescope.<\/p>\n<p>All of which means that this first image of a supermassive black hole almost certainly will be improved upon in years to come.<\/p>\n<p><em>Here are the six open-access papers authored by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration and published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters, with \u201cFirst M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results\u201d as the overall title:<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>\u201cI. The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole\u201d<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>\u201cII. Array and Instrumentation\u201d<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>\u201cIII. Data Processing and Calibration\u201d<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>\u201cIV. Imaging the Central Supermassive Black Hole\u201d<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>\u201cV. Physical Origin of the Asymmetric Ring\u201d<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>\u201cVI. The Shadow and Mass of the Central Black Hole\u201d<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>This report has gone through frequent updates, most recently at 10:57 a.m. PT.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This image from the Event Horizon Telescope shows the supermassive black hole in the elliptical galaxy M87, surrounded by superheated material. (EHT Collaboration) WASHINGTON, D.C. \u2014 Scientists today shared the first picture to show the immediate surroundings of a galaxy\u2019s supermassive black hole, captured by a network of radio telescopes that adds up to what [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1661,1975,2675,2001],"class_list":["post-18092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-astronomy","tag-black-holes","tag-event-horizon-telescope","tag-radio-astronomy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18092"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18092\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}