#EHTBlackHole #BlackHoleDay #RealBlackHole #BlackHole
The first ever image of black hole image has been released. This happened on 10 Apr 2019, Wednesday at 1300hrs GMT as Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project released the image simultaneously at six press conference across the globe.
The image revealed is that of the black hole at the center of Messier 87 (M87), a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster.
The first ever image of a black hole.
Taken by Event Horizon Telescope. #EUFunded.#RealBlackHole. pic.twitter.com/seOgqfkuYL— European Commission 🇪🇺 (@EU_Commission) April 10, 2019
This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun.
“What we see is larger than the size of our entire Solar System,” said Prof Heino Falcke, of Radboud University in the Netherlands, who proposed the experiment.
According to eventhorizontelescope.org, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration and was designed to capture the black hole image.
Creating the EHT was a formidable challenge which required upgrading and connecting a worldwide network of eight pre-existing telescopes deployed at a variety of challenging high-altitude sites.
The locations of these telescopes includes volcanoes in Hawai`i and Mexico, mountains in Arizona and the Spanish Sierra Nevada, the Chilean Atacama Desert, and Antarctica.
You can watch the live conference which was streamed on the The European Commission Youtube channel.
In case you are wondering what a black hole is, we looked it up for you. Reference to Wikipedia, a black hole is a region of spacetime exhibiting such strong gravitational effects that nothing, not even particles and electromagnetic radiation such as light, can escape from inside it.
