Scientists release first-ever photo of black hole
Scientists from a global collaboration of telescopes announced Wednesday that they have captured the first-ever photo of a black hole.
Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun pic.twitter.com/AymXilKhKe
— Event Horizon 'Scope (@ehtelescope) April 10, 2019
The collaboration, called the Event Horizon Telescope, is a global network of eight telescopes that has been working for two years to capture the first image of a black hole, by combining data from the eight telescopes and “creating a virtual Earth-sized telescope.”
“We have seen what we thought was unseeable,” Shep Doeleman, the director of the EHT, said during a news conference Wednesday.
In 2017, the group embarked on a weeklong observation spanning telescopes in four continents, capturing data from two black holes: one in Sagittarius A*, located at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and the other in the Messier 87 galaxy, in the constellation Virgo.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
