It's Finally Here! The First Image Of A Black Hole
Of course we dropped everything and quickly made a video to celebrate the new image released from the Event Horizon Telescope. Enjoy.
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All that waiting has paid off. Here it is, the first ever image of a black hole.
This incredible photograph is the result of a planet-wide effort by radio astronomers and their telescopes, petabytes of data, and an incomprehensible amount of computing power.
The supermassive black hole at the center of the distant galaxy Messier 87, an object as big as the Solar System, which absorbs all the light and matter that falls into it. An object with 6 billion times the mass of the Sun, and you’re looking at a photograph of it.
Today’s a good day for astronomy.
Watch the video here:
Comments (5)
It IS a stunning image. No doubt about that. Especially when you understand how complex the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project was - hooking-up and processing the data from all those telescopes from around the world with extreme timing precision - even taking into account how the telescopes move and drift (the telescope in the Antarctic is on a moving ice-shelf). I have one point to make about the reporting of this most wonderful, momentous achievement: the image is NOT an image of the black hole itself - it is an image of the accretion disk material emission and the SHADOW of the black hole. The EHT project on their website state in their notes section "The shadow of a black hole is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape" but almost all headlines in publications around the world and online state inaccurately 'first image of a black hole'! It isn't! Come on Fraser, I love what you do - really, but you can do better than that...
She's a beauty!
It was worth the wait Fraser! Outstanding!!!
Thanks for posting this, Fraser, and for the extra understanding I get from your posts.
It was worth staying up late for last night (Sydney, Australia time) to see the live announcement. Nobody does understated glee like astronomers do!