NEW YORK, April 10 -- For the first time ever, humanity can gaze at an actual photograph of a supermassive black hole. It’s an achievement that’s taken supercomputers, eight telescopes stationed around the world, hundreds of researchers, and vast amounts of data. The results from this project, called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), were announced today at joint press conferences streamed around the world. “Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the Universe,” Sheperd Doleman, the Project Director of the Event Horizon Telescope said at a press conference today before unveiling the image. The picture shows the black hole at the center of the huge galaxy Messier 87 (M87), located 53 million light years away from Earth. The black hole in this galaxy has a mass that the Event Horizon Telescope researchers estimate at six billion times more massive than our Sun. In addition to being gargantuan, M87’s black hole was already intriguing to researchers. In some early pictures of the galaxy, they notices a massive jet of plasma streaming out from its center. Scientists think that the jet is made of material that never quite made it into the event horizon of the black hole. Instead, the movement of M87’s black hole (which researchers believe is spinning rapidly) accelerated the plasma and sent it shooting out into the universe, a beacon to distant astronomers. The Event Horizon Telescope is not a single, traditional telescope, but rather refers to a group of eight radio telescopes stationed on five continents, which all observed the same areas of space over the course of one week in April 2017. According to the Event Horizon Telescope, a conventional telescope would have to be approximately the size of Earth in order to take this particular snapshot of the black hole at the center of M87. “This is a picture you would have seen if you had eyes as big as the Earth and were observing in radio,” Dimitrios Psaltis, an Event Horizon Telescope project scientist at the University of Arizona said. Individually, none of the telescopes measured up, but by coordinating their efforts, the researchers were able to zero in M87, collecting massive amounts of data in the process.
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