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First image of blackhole12/20/2023 "It’s a donut sort of thing - but not a frisbee," said Lai. Yet from another view, we would see that the event horizon is not a flat disk with a big hole in the middle (where an enormous black hole lies). We're largely seeing the "face" of the event horizon, like the face of a coin, as opposed to the side or edge, explained Chris Fryer, an astrophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who had no role in the collaboration. An invisible sphere surrounded by a donutįrom our far-off view of this great black hole, it might look like a bright, flat ring. "It's the last little scream of the gas until we can't hear it scream anymore."Īs long as there's a rotating disk of super-heated gas around a black hole, there will be a circular boundary, showing where the event horizon ends, and the black hole begins. ![]() "You don't want to be too close to a black hole," said Lai. The fervent scream of light gets devoured. "It's the last little scream of the gas until we can't hear it scream anymore." "Whenever you squeeze something down you end up heating it up - and hot gas glows," said Bentz, noting that the brightest gases will soon fall into the black hole. The hottest, most squeezed, and compressed gas lies just at the edge of the event horizon. This black hole is pulling in matter from a nearby star. "It's like moving your hands together in the wintertime," said Lai, who was also not involved in the project.Īn illustration of a black hole surrounded by hot gas. Gases get condensed as they speed around the black hole, and all this friction creates heat. This is the nature of gravity, somewhat similar to the way the moon orbits around a more massive Earth, explained Dong Lai, an astronomer and black hole expert at Cornell University. Inevitably, this hot gas rotates around the great black hole. The center of many, but not all, galaxies swirl with lots of matter, specifically gas. Without a clear view of the event horizon, we wouldn't have an image depicting a conspicuous, circular (though somewhat blurry) ring around the black hole. ![]() "That’s something we didn’t know before today." The event horizon "The fact that we see the evidence of the event horizon means the thing we call a black hole actually exits in nature," added Bentz, who had no role in the collaboration. "We don’t have to couch it in those terms." "We learned that we don’t have to say 'putative black hole'," said Misty Bentz, an astrophysicist who researches black holes at Georgia State University. The secretive lab that built ‘the bomb’ now scours Mars for signs of life This black hole contains the mass of 6.5 billion suns, and is 38 billion kilometers across.Īnd its picture is scientifically priceless.īefore today, astrophysicists often called black holes "putative black holes," meaning something that's supposed or presumed to be a black hole. ![]() This particular black hole is "supermassive." It's located some 54 million light years away at the center of the galaxy us Earthlings call Messier 87, or M87. So, although the black hole is itself invisible - a black mass that consumes light - we can see exactly where this giant spherical object begins, and where it lies. "It's the last possible point that we could see until you're so close to the black hole that nothing can escape." "What this brings to the table is the event horizon," astrophysicist Erin Macdonald, who had no role in the project, said in an interview. This final boundary between space and the black hole, the point of no return, is called the "event horizon." More precisely, we can see a prominent ring of super-heated gas around the very edge of a black hole. Yet, we now have a picture of "the unseeable." "Black holes are gravity run amok," said Broderick. These were the words spoken by astrophysicist Avery Broderick on Wednesday morning, one of some 200 scientists of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration who captured humanity's first image of a black hole - a zone in space so gravitationally powerful that whatever light falls in can't possibly escape.
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