BLACKHOLE PICTURE SERIES

“This observation lays the foundation for future studies of black holes and could play a crucial role in our understanding of the behaviour of light and matter in the most extreme environments in our Universe.'īlack holes are extraordinary cosmic objects with enormous masses but extremely compact sizes. It’s the closest we can get to imaging a black hole, which is an object with such a strong a gravitational field that no light or matter can escape,” said Dr Ziri Younsi (UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory), part of the EHT collaboration. “We have accomplished something many thought impossible by imaging the shadow of a black hole and it provides the strongest evidence to date that such evasive and enigmatic entities do indeed exist. It was achieved by a team of more than 200 researchers from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America.

BLACKHOLE PICTURE SERIES

The EHT is an international collaboration specifically set up to image a black hole by linking eight ground-based radio telescopes globally to make an Earth-sized virtual telescope with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution.įollowing decades of observational, technical and theoretical work, the breakthrough was announced today in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. It has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun.Īlthough supermassive black holes are relatively tiny astronomical objects, this was predicted to be one of the largest viewable black holes from Earth, making it the perfect target for the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). Nestled at the heart of distant galaxy, Messier 87, which is 55 million light-years away in the Virgo galaxy cluster, the black hole measures just under 40 billion kilometres across, which is ~3 million times the diameter of the Earth. The first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow have been unveiled by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration involving UCL researchers.

Blackhole picture