Group of more than 200 scientists and engineers from 20 nations managed to combine eight of the world's most sensitive radio telescopes, a network of synchronized atomic clocks, two exclusively constructed supercomputers and several new algorithms in computational imaging. After over 10 years of work, this aggregate exertion, known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, was at last ready to enlighten perhaps the best secret of nature.
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| Black hole at the center of galaxy M87. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope |
A black hole is extremely dense object from which even light can not escape. Anything that draws near black hole's "event horizon" its point of no return, will be consumed, never to re-emerge, on account of black hole's unfathomably solid gravity. By its actual nature, black hole can't be seen, yet the hot disc of material that circles it radiates brilliantly. Against a brilliant setting, like this disc, a black hole seems to project a shadow.
The dazzling new picture shows the shadow of the supermassive black hole in the center of Messier 87 (M87), an elliptical galaxy about 55 million light-years from Earth. This black hole is 6.5 multiple times the mass of the Sun. Capture of its image included eight ground-based radio telescopes all throughout the planet, working together as though they were one telescope the size of our whole planet.
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| Radio Telescopes used to convert earth into telescope. Credit: SpringerLink |
To complement the EHT findings, several NASA spacecraft were part of a large effort, coordinated by the EHT’s Multiwavelength Working Group, to observe the black hole using different wavelengths of light. As part of this effort, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory space telescope missions, all attuned to different varieties of X-ray light, turned their gaze to the M87 black hole around the same time as the EHT in April 2017. NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope was also watching for changes in gamma-ray light from M87 during the EHT observations. If EHT observed changes in the structure of the black hole’s environment, data from these missions and other telescopes could be used to help figure out what was going on.
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| Chandra X-Ray Observatory close-up of the core of the galaxy M87. Credit: NASA/CXC |
NASA space telescopes have previously studied a jet extending more than 1,000 light-years away from the center of M87. The jet is made of particles going close to the speed of light, taking shots out at high energies from near the event horizon. The EHT was planned contemplate the origin of this jet and others like it. A blob of matter in the jet called HST-1, found by Hubble astronomers in 1999, has gone through a strange pattern of lighting up and diminishing.
References: nasa.gov, SpringerLink, Event Horizon Telescope
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