1/20/2024 0 Comments First photo of black hole![]() ![]() Time: allow 25 minutes to complete this activityīrainstorm some possible headlines for your new shortened news story. Rewrite the article for someone who is ‘time poor’ so that they could get the gist of the story in under 100 words. This news story is quite long and includes a lot of detail. Though the presence of a black hole was thought to be the only plausible* explanation, the new image provides the first, direct visual proof. In the 1990s, astronomers mapped the orbits of the brightest stars near the centre of the Milky Way, confirming the presence of a supermassive compact object there, work that led to the 2020 Nobel prize in Physics. Located 27,000 light years from Earth, its existence has been assumed since 1974 when an unusual radio source was detected at the centre of the galaxy. The black hole has been given the name Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star), or Sgr A* for short, because it was detected in the direction of the constellation* Sagittarius. Picture: AFPĮHT project scientist Geoffrey Bower, of Taiwan’s Academia Sinica, said: “These unprecedented* observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very centre of our galaxy.” This glowing halo* swirls around the black hole’s boundary beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape its gravitational pull*.ĭr Issaoun said that from Earth the black hole would look about the same size as a doughnut on the surface of the Moon.Ĭenter for Astrophysics astrophysicist Michael Johnson speaks during a news conference in Washington DC to announce the first image of Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. The image does not show the black hole itself – because it is completely dark – but the glowing ultra-hot plasma* and gas that encircles the phenomenon* in a bright ringlike structure. “Today, right this moment, we have direct evidence that this object is a black hole.” “For decades, we have known about a compact object that is at the heart of our galaxy that is four million times more massive than our Sun,” said Harvard University astronomer Dr Sara Issaoun. The image, produced by a global team of scientists known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, is the first, direct visual confirmation of the presence of this invisible object, and comes three years after the very first image of a black hole from a distant galaxy. This is a major milestone in astronomy, and it's only going to get better from here.An international team of astronomers has captured the first image of a supermassive black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy. In the future, the Event Horizon Telescope will have a "substantially increased" sensitivity as the Greenland Telescope, IRAM NOEMA Observatory and Kitt Peak Telescopes join the array. It promises to shed more light on black holes as well. It's a fuzzy image, but it supports what the theory of general relativity has predicted for decades. Supercomputers at the Max Planck Institute and MIT's Haystack Observatory had to combine "petabytes" of raw data from the telescopes. This technique, very-long-baseline interferometry, also involved synchronizing atomic clocks and even taking advantage of the rotation of the Earth. ![]() The image required connecting eight existing high-altitude telescopes, including ones in 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) at an extreme distance. As you might imagine, taking this picture was tricky - it required worldwide collaboration that wasn't possible until recently. It also confirms that the black hole is truly huge, with a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. 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. After years of relying on computer-generated imagery, scientists using the Event Horizon Telescope have captured the first real image of a black hole. ![]()
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