Priya Natarajan, who was not involved with the research, studies the unseen. WATCH | CBC's science reporter answers your questions about back holes in a Facebook Live: Instead of having a telescope that measures perhaps a few metres or tens of metres across, astronomers now have telescopes that work in unison and become "Earth-sized." This allows astronomers to collect data that provides an image of the black hole, though with some missing data. This black hole has a mass of about 4.3 million times that of our sun.Īstronomers have been trying to directly image a black hole, but imaging something that is so far off and essentially invisible requires some out-of-the-box thinking.Įnter the EHT, a collection of eight telescopes that span the globe. M87 was one of two targets for the EHT, the second being Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy, some 25,000 light-years away. (NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team/STScI/AURA) M87 and its jet of subatomic particles is seen here in a Hubble Space Telescope image travelling at nearly the speed of light. Instead, particles are flung out just before crossing what is called the event horizon, the point of no return around a black hole, after which the black hole consumes whatever has fallen in and grows. These aren't particles that have fallen inside a black hole, since nothing can escape once it has fallen in. Not only is it incredibly massive, but it is also spewing a stream of particles outwards. M87's black hole has long been intriguing for astronomers and astrophysicists. So has Einstein's theory passed the test so far? "That's completely new and extremely powerful." "We're able to probe general relativity in this region that has never been accessed before," Broderick said. That kind of extreme gravity doesn't exist in our solar system, but it does in black holes. But when gravity becomes extreme, Newton's laws and general relativity predict very different things. ![]() On Earth, Newton's laws of physics and the way they describe gravity work pretty well. That's because the images allow scientists to test Einstein's general theory of relativity in ways that they never have before. And we really just are standing at the threshold today." "But at the same time I'm very excited about the future because this marks the beginning of a new era in astronomy, a new era of research into gravity. ![]() "Seeing the culmination of that effort was simply a marvelous moment," Broderick said. Avery Broderick, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics Black holes are made real - they're not just the scribblings on theorists' chalkboards anymore, but they really are out there in the night. That includes both matter and light, making them black and invisible - and therefore very difficult to see and photograph.Īn international team of more than 200 people spent more than a decade working to capture the image released today. This black hole is one of the most massive known: it's six billion times more massive than our sun.īlack holes are so dense and have such strong gravity that anything that crosses their threshold - known as the event horizon - gets pulled into them, never to return. The image, which shows an orange ring around a round, black silhouette, is of the black hole at the centre of Messier 87 (M87), a galaxy 50 million light-years from Earth. ![]() "Black holes are made real - they're not just the scribblings on theorists' chalkboards anymore, but they really are out there in the night." "We've now seen the unseeable," said Avery Broderick, a physicist at the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute who was part of the international EHT research team. Astronomers using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) have, for the first time, photographed one. This includes light, which is why black holes are so notoriously difficult to detect, unless they're interacting with a nearby star.Black holes have been mysterious and elusive - until now. They are extremely dense regions of space with a gravitational field, where anything that crosses their threshold - known as the event horizon - gets pulled in, never to return. Most black holes are created when a massive star dies and collapses in on itself, though astronomers are still trying to determine how supermassive black holes form. Together, they allow astronomers to make more detailed observations that are unrivalled by any singular telescope. Have they seen Sag A*, the black hole we orbit that is 4 million times the mass of the sun, 30 times the radius, and 26,000 light years away? Stay tuned EHT is made up of a collection of eight telescopes around the world that, when used together, act as one giant, Earth-sized telescope. There is a big announcement from Event Horizon Telescope planned for Thursday about our very own Milky Way galaxy.
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