“This is the first image of the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy. Today, we have direct evidence that this object is a black hole,' said Sera Markoff, an astronomer and EHT team member based at the University of Amsterdam
”: a picture of a black hole. In reality, we can’t outright see a black hole—an object so dense that light cannot escape it. But what the team at the Event Horizon Telescope managed to do was capture its bright silhouette, composed of extremely hot, super-charged gas and plasma that swirls around the black hole’s “event horizon,” or the point of no return.
On the left is M87*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy Messier 87 , 55 million light-years away. On the right is Sagittarius A* , the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way.But the photo did do one thing that was especially critical to astronomy and physics: it helped confirm Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which says that matter moving towards us will appear brighter than matter moving away from us.
“We were all amazed that the image of Sgr A* looked so similar to the image of the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy,” said Markoff. This is in spite of the fact that Sgr A* is more than 1,000 times smaller. It has an event horizon that’s 7.2 million miles long—15 times the Earth-Moon distance—with a mass 4 million times the sun. M87’s black hole is a whopping 23.6 billion miles long, and is more than 6.5 billion times as massive as the sun.
Both photos were taken using the same ingenious method of creating an approximate telescope the size of the Earth. EHT isn’t a singular instrument—it’s actually a network of eight radio telescope facilities from around the world, in locations like Hawaii, Chile, and the French Alps.
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