Source: Neatorama
After a week of teasing, astronomers have finally released the first image of a black hole, as taken by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of 8 radio telescopes around the world
The black hole, which weighs 6.5-billion times that of the Sun and resides some 55 million light-years from Earth, is at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the Virgo galaxy cluster.
“We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole,” said EHT Director and astrophysicist Sheperd Doeleman as reported by Science News:
That’s because black holes are notoriously hard to see. Their gravity is so extreme that nothing, not even light, can escape across the boundary at a black hole’s edge, known as the event horizon. But some black holes, especially supermassive ones dwelling in galaxies’ centers, stand out by voraciously accreting bright disks of gas and other material. The EHT image reveals the shadow of M87’s black hole on its accretion disk. Appearing as a fuzzy, asymmetrical ring, it unveils for the first time a dark abyss…
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