The black hole’s boundary - the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name - is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across. The shadow of a black hole seen here is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. In coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the centre of Messier 87 and its shadow. is 6.The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) - a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration - was designed to capt ure images of a black hole. “Of course we get to see a black hole before a Brexit deal,” wryly remarked journalist Claire Barthelemy on Twitter. Or the art of Jack Goldstein, specifically his “Untitled” (1988), which blurs the boundaries between painted and digital image.Īnd as is their tech-given rite, social media users have seized upon the black hole like cats to a cosmos-obliterating ball of yarn. The work of Wojciech Fangor comes to mind his blurry dichromatic creations from the sixties are similarly circular, mysterious, and disconcerting. The work of Wojciech Fangor comes to mind his blurry, dichromatic circular paintingsįrom an art historical angle, the black hole resembles something modernist, like a Color-field painting or a piece of Op art. And contemporary entertainment like the movies Interstellar and High Life have imagined more beautiful versions of the black hole with sparkling stardust and blinding light.Īrt historically, the black hole resembles something modernist, like a color-field painting or a piece of optical art. A swirl of cosmic matter, the black hole does somewhat resemble artistic interpretations of the past but with a less-fantastical smattering of starlight. Located some 55 million light-years away from Earth in the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, the hazy ring of unbalanced light contains a mass some 6.5 billion times that of our sun. Most everyone, including the New York Times, has compared the black hole to the Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings trilogy - a symbol of ultimate evil. Several other collisions have been detected by astronomers ever since now this clash of giants has a face.īut what that face resembles, exactly, is up for interpretation. Three years ago, another system called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, detected the collision of a pair of distant black holes, which rippled through the Universe. The effort wouldn’t have been possible without Katie Bouman, who developed a crucial algorithm for the imaging methods while she was a graduate student in computer science and artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The telescope array is named after the edge of a black hole where time stands still and gravity warps space into its almost-unfathomable gravitational pull. Yesterday’s results are the product of 10 years of research by astronomers with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, which consists of a network of radio antennas and two years of computer analysis based on the system’s observations. Because gravity distorts spacetime itself, light becomes deflected into a circular funnel of shadows illustrated by the image. Accordingly, the image is not a “photograph” of the black hole but a vision of the effects gravity has on radio waves emitted from matter surrounding the black hole. Scientific observations over the last 60 years have increasingly demonstrated that objects exist in the Universe whose gravitational fields are so intense that they can warp spacetime such that light cannot escape beyond a point of no return.
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