Very first image of a black hole series#

The explanation for that draws on the work of Einstein. With its glowing orange ring around a black center, the image of the black hole resembles the Eye of Sauron in the Lord of the Rings movies.

The Eye of Sauron is burned in our brains from Lord of the Rings. And if you think superheroes are cheaters, you're just jealous. In other words, it's not cheating, it's more like a superpower. This black hole image uses the same concept, converting the energy from a black hole that can be picked up at a massive distance using an ingenious planet-sized telescope into something our dumb eyes can actually perceive. Night vision goggles work by converting infrared radiation into visible colors that we can see.

Think of it this way: A step below visible light on the electromagnetic spectrum is infrared, which we can't perceive with our eyes but we can feel as heat. You might feel like imaging a black hole with radio waves is cheating, that we're not really seeing it by picking up its radio signal, but that's not right. When we look at a tree or sign, what we really see are photons in the visible spectrum reflecting off those objects.īut galactic objects like stars and black holes emit light along different points on the spectrum, including as the low-frequency radiation we know as radio waves. That data is still being processed, but we could see it soon.Īnd in case you're wondering how radio signals create an image, given that we don't typically get great pictures out of AM or FM broadcasts, keep in mind that our eyes can only process a very limited portion of the spectrum of light (also known as electromagnetic radiation) - the part we call visible light.

The EHT team has also attempted to image Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. 'We think we can make the image perhaps a little sharper through algorithms,' he said. It may also be possible to fine tune the above image as well. A telescope in Greenland has already come online to contribute to the effort. Yes, the resulting image looks a little blurry, but Doeleman told reporters that future images can become much sharper as more telescopes are added to the EHT. Instead, each observatory's data was stored on a physical hard drive and then transported to a supercomputer, where it was merged with the rest to form the new image. Petabytes of radio signal data were collected - too much to be efficiently transferred via the internet. It required the eight telescopes to sync up with extreme precision to observe the galaxy Messier 87 and the supermassive black hole at its center with a mass 6.5 billion times that of the sun. The observation run that produced the image revealed Wednesday actually happened back in 2017. The basic concept is to combine the signal strength of the observatories on different corners of the globe to form an array as wide as Earth itself. Rather than a single observatory, the EHT is eight radio telescopes - located in Hawaii, Arizona, Chile, Mexico and Spain, and at the South Pole - and synchronized to form an array called a Very Large Baseline Interferometer.

Very first image of a black hole series#

The findings were also announced in a series of six papers published in a special issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. 'It is also consistent, the shape of this shadow. 'We now have visual evidence for a black hole,' EHT project director Sheperd Doeleman told reporters at a press conference in Washington DC. That's because it could either confirm or cast doubt upon theories of gravity developed by Albert Einstein over a century ago that are fundamental to our understanding of the universe and the laws of physics that govern our daily lives. Besides just being cool, seeing the exact shape of a black hole for the first time was a big deal for science.