Black hole image: Scientists reveal first ever photo from Event Horizon telescope – as it happened
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Your support makes all the difference.An international scientific team on Wednesday announced a milestone in astrophysics - the first-ever photo of a black hole - using a global network of telescopes to gain insight into celestial objects with gravitational fields so strong no matter or light can escape.
The research was conducted by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, an international collaboration begun in 2012 to try to directly observe the immediate environment of a black hole using a global network of Earth-based telescopes. The announcement was made in simultaneous news conferences in Washington, Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo.
The image reveals the black hole at the centre of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides about 54 million light-years from Earth.
Black holes, phenomenally dense celestial entities, are extraordinarily difficult to observe despite their great mass. A black hole's event horizon is the point of no return beyond which anything - stars, planets, gas, dust and all forms of electromagnetic radiation - gets swallowed into oblivion.
"This is a huge day in astrophysics," said US National Science Foundation Director France Cardova. "We're seeing the unseeable."
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Speakers at the press conference are stressing that as much as the picture, it will be all mass of knowledge that will be based on it: we'll be working to understand what we see, for centuries.
(We're having a little discussion about the EU's commitment to science and openness.)
"Black holes are stranger than anything dreamt up by science fiction writers, but they are firmly matters of science fact."
The scientists are now explicitly killing time: they can't announce until 7 past, so we've just got to wait it out!
We should have a better version imminently, when the website comes back to life...
“We have accomplished something many thought impossible by imaging the shadow of a black hole and it provides the strongest evidence to date that such evasive and enigmatic entities do indeed exist. It’s the closest we can get to imaging a black hole, which is an object with such a strong a gravitational field that no light or matter can escape,” said Dr Ziri Younsi (UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory), part of the EHT collaboration.
“This observation lays the foundation for future studies of black holes and could play a crucial role in our understanding of the behaviour of light and matter in the most extreme environments in our Universe."
“We are giving humanity its first view of a black hole -- a one-way door out of our universe,” said EHT project director Sheperd S. Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. “This is a landmark in astronomy, an unprecedented scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers.”
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