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(Also see "Black Hole at Galaxy's Heart Launches Planet-Size 'Spitballs.'") The telescope zeroed in on two supermassive black holes: a beast as massive as four million suns called Sagittarius A*, which lies at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, and a black hole about 1,500 times heavier at the core of the nearby galaxy M87. Known as the Event Horizon Telescope, the radio-dish network opened its eye on the heavens during a 10-day window that started on April 4. This electronically linked network of eight observatories created a virtual telescope dish as wide as the planet. Getting this far took years of planning and cooperation between international partners at observatories stretching from the tallest mountain in Hawaii to the frozen terrain of the South Pole. Even Einstein wasn’t sure that they actually existed.Īccording to Falcke, the first images “will turn black holes from some mythical object to something concrete that we can study.” Grueling Weather Watch Yet astronomers have only circumstantial evidence that they lie hidden at the heart of every large galaxy in the universe. “They are the ultimate endpoint of space and time, and may represent the ultimate limit of our knowledge,” says Falcke. (Read "Einstein's Relativity Affects Aging on Earth, Slightly.") The existence of extremely massive black holes was one of the first predictions of Einstein’s theory. Introduced in 1915, Einstein’s revolutionary theory says that matter warps or curves the geometry of space-time, and we experience that distortion as gravity. “Even if the first images are still crappy and washed out, we can already test for the first time some basic predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity in the extreme environment of a black hole,” says radio astronomer Heino Falcke of Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
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“I’m very happy and very relieved, and I’m looking forward to getting a good night’s sleep,” Fish says.īut that sense of relief is tinged with anticipation: So much data takes time to process, and the team must wait months to find out if their massive effort was truly a success. Another was listening to the triumphant chords of Bohemian Rhapsody. One noted that he was about to open a bottle of 50-year-old Scotch. For the past week, Fish had been on call 24/7, sleeping fitfully with his cell phone next to him, the ringer set loud.Īs the last of the data arrived at project observatories, he watched celebratory comments come pouring in on a special chat line for radio astronomers and engineers. ET, team member Vincent Fish sat contentedly in his office at the MIT Haystack Observatory in Westford, Massachusetts. Called the event horizon, this is the boundary beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape the object’s gargantuan grasp.Īs the final observing run ended at 11:22 a.m. More precisely, the hoped-for portrait is of a mysterious region that surrounds the black hole. Westford, MassachusettsFor the monster at the Milky Way’s heart, it’s a wrap.Īfter completing five nights of observations, today astronomers may finally have captured the first-ever image of the famous gravitational sinkhole known as a black hole. On April 10, 2019, astronomers from the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration revealed the first-ever image of a black hole's shadow: a view of the supermassive black hole at the heart of Messier 87, a large galaxy within the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster.