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The shadow, caused by the gravitational bending of light, provides a huge amount of information about the nature of these fascinating objects, and enabled the researchers to measure the black hole’s enormous mass: 6.5 billion times that of our Sun, located in a region 20 billion kilometres across, approximately twice the size of our Solar System. The image published today clearly shows a ring-like structure with a dark, circular central region: this is the shadow of the black hole standing out against a bright background, exactly as predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
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This is the most sensitive single antenna in the EHT network and the only observatory in Europe to participate in the 2017 observation campaign: without it, it would have been impossible to obtain this first image of a black hole. , played a key role in this result via its 30-metre telescope, located near Granada (Spain). The Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique (IRAM), founded in 1979 by the CNRS and the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (MPG, Germany) 1 Around four petabytes of data were recorded, which were then processed by dedicated supercomputers in Bonn (Germany) and Haystack (United States). This technique enabled the EHT to achieve a sensitivity and spatial resolution (20 microarcseconds) never previously achieved: it would enable someone in Paris to read a newspaper located in New York! The black hole was observed by the EHT on April 5, 6, 10 and 11, 2017. This required extremely precise synchronization of the eight radio telescopes, using high-precision atomic clocks. Using an interferometry technique that makes use of the rotation of our planet, it forms a huge virtual telescope with a theoretical aperture the size of the diameter of the Earth. In 2017, the network connected eight observatories on four continents for the first time. However, due to its exceptional mass and relative proximity to Earth (‘only’ 55 million light years away from us), the black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy was a perfect target for the EHT. Despite their huge mass and tremendous impact on their environment, black holes are very small bodies, making them particularly difficult to detect. Their gravitational attraction is so strong that nothing, neither matter nor light, can escape from them. He added: “It has a gravitational pull strong enough to make stars orbit around it very quickly - as fast as 20 years.Black holes are extremely dense cosmic objects. “More than 50 years ago, scientists saw that there was something very bright at the centre of our galaxy,” AFP quoted Paul McNamara, an astrophysicist at the European Space Agency and an expert on black holes, as saying. While astronomers have been talking about “dark stars” since 1700s, the community eventually speculated that these bright spots were in fact “black holes”, with American physicist John Archibald Wheeler coming out with the term in the mid-1960s. The Event Horizon Telescope had been designed for this specific purpose of capturing the image of a black hole.īlack hole has long been a subject of human curiosity. Termed as “Gates of Hell”, the spokesperson said that you cannot photograph a black hole but you can see its shadow, that’s when light disappears behind the Event Horizon. National Science Foundation April 10, 2019 It was captured by the #NSFFunded project. You're looking at the first ever image of a black hole. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun. Scientists obtained the image using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. Just a few seconds past 18:30 hours IST, the world witnessed the first ever real image of the Black Hole.