Here's the stunning first recorded image of a massive black hole
On Wednesday morning, the National Science Foundation and the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration released what they say is the first recorded image of a massive black hole. And it is stunning.
Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun pic.twitter.com/AymXilKhKe
— Event Horizon 'Scope (@ehtelescope) April 10, 2019
The image is a composite of images taken from five petabytes worth of data that was captured by a series of radio dishes laid out around Earth that allowed the project to capture continuous data from the black hole even while Earth rotated.
The @ehtelescope team built an Earth-sized telescope by linking radio dishes around the world.
In April 2017, all they all swiveled to look at the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87, a galaxy in Virgo constellation. #RealBlackHole #EHTBlackHole pic.twitter.com/0hUPpDbYkH— National Science Foundation (@NSF) April 10, 2019
The black hole is 6.5 billion — BILLION — times more massive than our own sun and is 55 million light years from Earth.
We'll continue to update the story as more information becomes available.
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