- The image of a dark core with a flame-orange halo of gas and plasma shows a supermassive black hole 50 million light years away…
- YES…It happened. Scientists using the Event Horizon Telescope (not through computer-generated imagery) have captured the first real image of a black hole. The snapshot of the supermassive black hole in the Messier 87 galaxy (about 55 million light years away) shows the “shadow” created as the event horizon bends and sucks in light. It also confirms that the black hole is truly huge, with a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun.
- Taking this picture was tricky — it required worldwide collaboration that wasn’t possible until recently.
- The image required connecting eight existing high-altitude telescopes, including ones Chile and Antarctica, to reach an angular resolution high enough to capture such a relatively compact object (the event horizon is “just” 24.9 billion miles across).
- This technique, also involved synchronizing atomic clocks and even taking advantage of the rotation of the Earth. Supercomputers at the Max Planck Institute and MIT’s Haystack Observatory had to combine “petabytes” of raw data from the telescopes.
For more amazing and detailed info, please visit – https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/black-hole-image-makes-history/
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