M87 was one of two targets for the EHT, the second being Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy, some 25,000 light-years away. (NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team/STScI/AURA) M87 and its jet of subatomic particles is seen here in a Hubble Space Telescope image travelling at nearly the speed of light. Instead, particles are flung out just before crossing what is called the event horizon, the point of no return around a black hole, after which the black hole consumes whatever has fallen in and grows. These aren't particles that have fallen inside a black hole, since nothing can escape once it has fallen in. Not only is it incredibly massive, but it is also spewing a stream of particles outwards. M87's black hole has long been intriguing for astronomers and astrophysicists. So has Einstein's theory passed the test so far? "That's completely new and extremely powerful." "We're able to probe general relativity in this region that has never been accessed before," Broderick said. That kind of extreme gravity doesn't exist in our solar system, but it does in black holes. But when gravity becomes extreme, Newton's laws and general relativity predict very different things. On Earth, Newton's laws of physics and the way they describe gravity work pretty well. That's because the images allow scientists to test Einstein's general theory of relativity in ways that they never have before. And we really just are standing at the threshold today." "But at the same time I'm very excited about the future because this marks the beginning of a new era in astronomy, a new era of research into gravity. "Seeing the culmination of that effort was simply a marvelous moment," Broderick said. Avery Broderick, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics Black holes are made real - they're not just the scribblings on theorists' chalkboards anymore, but they really are out there in the night. That includes both matter and light, making them black and invisible - and therefore very difficult to see and photograph.Īn international team of more than 200 people spent more than a decade working to capture the image released today. This black hole is one of the most massive known: it's six billion times more massive than our sun.īlack holes are so dense and have such strong gravity that anything that crosses their threshold - known as the event horizon - gets pulled into them, never to return. The image, which shows an orange ring around a round, black silhouette, is of the black hole at the centre of Messier 87 (M87), a galaxy 50 million light-years from Earth. "Black holes are made real - they're not just the scribblings on theorists' chalkboards anymore, but they really are out there in the night." "We've now seen the unseeable," said Avery Broderick, a physicist at the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute who was part of the international EHT research team. Astronomers using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) have, for the first time, photographed one. Black holes have been mysterious and elusive - until now.
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