Black hole

If you're not that impressed by the first-ever picture of the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, then it may be you haven't quite grasped the gravity ...

In fact, the EHT is effectively a planet-sized telescope, made up of observatories in the South Pole, North and South America, Hawaii and Europe. But what it does do is help scientists gain greater understanding of the laws of nature. Before the image was taken, we did not even know for sure there was a black hole at the heart of the Milky Way.

The image is the first direct visual evidence of the "giant lurking at the centre of our galaxy".

It was published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. He said: "The gas in the vicinity of the black holes moves at the same speed — nearly as fast as light — around both Sgr A* and M87*. But where gas takes days to weeks to orbit the larger M87*, in the much smaller Sgr A* it completes an orbit in mere minutes. The effort to capture the image involved 300 researchers from 80 institutes around the world and comes on the back of the EHT's 2019 image of the M87*, the first ever direct visual image of a black hole.

The Event Horizon Telescope has now produced images of two surprisingly different supermassive black holes: the one in the center of a galaxy called M87 and ...

"Only a trickle of material is actually making it all the way to the black hole." Although the material surrounding Sagittarius A* is moving around the event horizon inconveniently fast, our supermassive black hole nonetheless offers a much tamer environment near its surface than M87* does. "Imaging Sagittarius A* was a bit of a messier story than imaging M87*," Bouman said. And the challenge of Sagittarius A* was evident as scientists analyzed the data the EHT gathered as well. That's the monster hiding within M87, also known as M87*. This black hole is farther away from Earth, of course, but it's also much larger, and material moves around its event horizon at a more leisurely pace. In particular, the two black holes differ in how difficult it is to image material moving around its boundary, or event horizon.

Pioneering Harvard-led global collaborative unveils latest portrait, bolstering understanding of relativity, gravity.

The project will involve designing new ultra-high-speed instrumentation and a plan to double the number of radio dishes in the EHT array that will allow scientists “to create an Earth-sized motion picture camera” that “will bring black holes to vibrant life,” said Doeleman, who also leads the ngEHT project. On Monday at 5:15 p.m. in the Harvard Science Center, Hall C, there will be a special public event with members of Harvard’s EHT team discussing the results. We’re hoping to add these new telescopes around the world and be able to really dig into those sharp features and to be able to see these high-resolution movies.” It also marks a monumental collaborative achievement for the EHT, made up of more than 300 researchers from 80 institutes around the globe and 11 observatories. The averaged image retains features more commonly seen in the varied images and suppresses features that appeared less frequently. “For Sgr A*, you have a toddler running around and you’re trying to get their portrait with the long-exposure camera. M87 is 55 million light-years away in the Virgo Galaxy cluster and has a mass about 6.5 billion times that of our sun. “This material scatters the light that we observe from Sgr A*. It’s like looking at something through frosted glass.” The researchers produced the picture with observations from the Event Horizon Telescope, a worldwide network of radio telescopes that link together to form a single Earth-sized virtual instrument. Sgr A*, on the other hand, is on the small side. The way the light bends around the dark center, known as the event horizon, shows the object’s powerful gravity, which is four million times that of our sun. An international team of astronomers led by scientists at the Center for Astrophysics

Event Horizon telescope captures image giving a glimpse of the turbulent heart of our galaxy.

The EHT picks up radiation emitted by particles within the accretion disc that are heated to billions of degrees as they orbit the black hole before plunging into the central vortex. Some combination of these factors – and possibly some extreme black hole phenomenon – explain the bright blobs in the image. A minority of scientists had continued to speculate about the possibility of other exotic objects, such as boson stars or clumps of dark matter. Markoff compared the observations with trying to photograph a puppy chasing its tail using a camera with a slow shutter speed. The black hole itself, known as Sagittarius A*, cannot be seen because no light or matter can escape its gravitational grip. It’s been a 100-year search for these things and so, scientifically, it’s a huge deal.”

Astronomers reveal the first ever image of the black hole at the core of our galaxy.

They'll even be looking to see if there are some star-sized black holes in the region, and for evidence of concentrated clumps of invisible, or dark, matter. What else could produce gravitational forces that accelerate nearby stars through space at speeds of up 24,000km/s (for comparison our Sun glides around the galaxy at a sedate 230km/s, or 140 miles per second)? The mass of a black hole determines the size of its accretion disc, or emission ring. So far, what they see is entirely consistent with the equations set out by Einstein in his theory of gravity, of general relativity. The 'hotspots' you see in the ring move around from day to day." This arrangement enables the EHT to cut an angle on the sky that is measured in microarcseconds.

Collapsed star located 25000 light years from Earth identified using Event Horizon Telescope.

The image, unveiled on Thursday, is from the international consortium behind the Event Horizon Telescope - eight synchronised radio telescopes around the ...

It is four million times more massive than our sun. The University of Arizona's Feryal Ozel described the black hole as "the gentle giant in the centre of our galaxy". The first image of the massive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy has been revealed.

Picture offers first direct evidence that vast object sits at the centre of the Milky Way.

Researchers now hope to gather more detail on our own black hole as well as take pictures of more of them, allowing for more detailed comparison and understanding of the still mostly mysterious objects. “The event horizon is the literal edge of space and time – everything we know about space and time breaks down at the event horizon. At some point, Einstein must be wrong, and scientists hope that future images can tell us more about the event horizon, or the very edge of the black hole, where Einstein’s theory would break down. The two black holes are remarkably similar. In the new image, the black hole itself stays invisible, because it is completely dark. Creating the latest image has taken five years of work by more than 300 researchers from across the world.

The Event Horizon Telescope network has captured the second-ever direct image of a black hole — called Sagittarius A* — at the centre of the Milky Way.

Many black holes, including M87*, display two beams of rapidly matter shooting out in opposite directions, presumably as a result of the intense heating of the in-falling gas. The EHT collected more data in 2018 but cancelled their planned observation campaigns in 2019 and 2020. But beginning in the 1990s, Falcke and others realized that the shadow of the black hole might be just large enough to be imaged with short radio waves, which can pierce that veil. Sagittarius A* might have had large jets in the past — as heated clouds of matter above and below the galactic centre suggest. “By averaging them together we are able to emphasize common features,” said EHT member José Gómez of the Andalusian Institute of Astrophysics in Granada, Spain. The next aim of the project is to generate a movie of the black hole to learn more about its physical properties, said Feryal Özel, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. In 2008, Doeleman’s team also conducted the first observations at the more technically challenging 1.3 millimetre wavelength. Then in 2015, groups joined forces as the EHT collaboration. Teams worldwide then refined their techniques, and retrofitted some major observatories so that they could add them to the network. Sagittarius A* is practically invisible to optical telescopes, because of the dust and gas on the galactic disk. But those features, known as Fermi bubbles, would seem to require matter to swirl around the black hole edge-on as seen from Earth, rather than face-on. But the Sagittarius A* data were more challenging to analyse. The source turned out to be unusually dim, dimmer than an average star.

As countless science and general news outlets have reported today, the image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, ...

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The stunning image is a product of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) – an array of eight telescopes in four continents that are able to operate in unison to ...

So, if the measurement of 4.3 million solar masses is correct, resulting in an event horizon that appears to be about 52 microarcseconds on the sky at our distance of 27,000 light years from the black hole, then the image of the black hole should show an event horizon of the same size. Nevertheless, the gas ring was seen to fluctuate over a matter of minutes as matter races around the black hole, the ring alive with turbulent energy. The size of a black hole’s event horizon is directly related to the mass of the black hole – the more massive the black hole, the larger the diameter of the event horizon. This means the brightness and pattern of the gas around Sagittarius A* was changing rapidly as we were observing it — a bit like trying to take a clear picture of a puppy quickly chasing its tail.” And because the accretion onto Sagittarius A* is so weak, the signal is fainter. By calculating their orbits, astronomers have been able to obtain precise measurements of the mass of Sagittarius A*, which they show to be 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun.

The first ever image of the black hole at the center of our galaxy has been released by scientists, who say it shows Albert Einstein was right about ...

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