General relativity lets us “see” both the front half and the back half of the event horizon simultaneously, producing a “shadow” of a black hole that is 2.6 times the radius of the black hole itself. The same phenomenon occurs with the event horizon itself. Some of it is instead curved back around the black hole, allowing one to see all sides of the accretion disk simultaneously. The gravitational pull of a black hole, in addition to creating a region of no return, warps spacetime so massively that light of the accretion disk isn’t simply radiated directly away from the black hole. Accretion disks emit every frequency of electromagnetic radiation-from radio to visible light to gamma-and their emissions are the most common way to infer the presence of a black hole. The closer the material is to the black hole, the faster it circles around and the hotter and brighter it becomes. It is comprised of gas and dust-and planets and stars-that stray too close and are captured by a black hole’s immense gravitational pull. One can, however, image the accretion disk. Anything passing through this so-called event horizon forevermore becomes a part of the black hole itself. A black hole is, by definition, not an object one can touch or see but rather a region of space with such intense gravity that no form of matter can escape, including light. Strictly speaking, the graphic released is not a photograph of a black hole. While the current scientific results do not incorporate their data, future calculations will be released combining radio and x-ray studies to provide a more complete picture of the interior of the Virgo galactic cluster’s second brightest galaxy.įurther black hole images will be released in the coming months as researchers finish processing more data, both of the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87 (dubbed M87), as well as of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. To complement the EHT measurements, NASA’s Chandra, NuSTAR and Swift space telescopes participated in the observing campaign. The observations necessary to pin down the size of the black hole were taken over the course of a week and as a result provide the first direct look at how the matter around a black hole changes in time. These observations also provide the first, if limited, data of the dynamics of an accretion disk, the bright material surrounding and spiraling towards the black hole.
Two hundred researchers in Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Europe, North and South America labored for two years to make this discovery, while hundreds more made the upgrades to each of the observatories necessary to achieve the required angular resolution (the precision necessary to detect an object so far away with the degree of accuracy required). These measurements are the first step toward a deeper understanding of how spacetime warps in the presence of mass and energy, the basis of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. A new level of astronomical technique provides insight into the structure of the black hole itself and the nature of gravity under such extreme conditions. The results from the planet-wide array of eight radio telescopes are the first direct measurements of the structure of a black hole and its surrounding environment.
Radio emissions collected in April 2017 by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration reveal a bright ring of light bent by the gravitational field of a black hole 55 million light years away, 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun and occupying a volume of space comparable to our entire Solar System.
Astronomers have published the first reconstructed image of a black hole, from the center of galaxy Messier 87.
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