The EHT's array of observatories includes telescopes in Chile, Hawaii, Arizona, Mexico, Spain and the South Pole, all precisely synchronized to collect several petabytes of data, all of it combined with the help of a supercomputer to create the first image of Sagittarius A. Better get out your super zoom lens, which is also kind of what the Event Horizon Telescope is. This is, of course, good news for all people interested in not getting sucked into a black hole, but it makes the thing very hard to photograph it would be comparable to trying to see the dimples on a golf ball in Los Angeles. This planet-sized observatory is necessary because, as the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory explains in the below animation, while Sagittarius A is 4 million times as massive as our sun, it's still really far away - a distance of about 26,000 light years. If you've seen pictures of the Very Large Array in New Mexico (featured prominently in the 1997 movie Contact) with its multiple telescopic dishes all working together, then you can visualize the concept: Just imagine Jodie Foster tapping into an array of dishes that are separated not by meters but by thousands of miles instead. The basic idea here is that radio telescopes in different locations are combining their signals to boost their power. The EHT is actually an array of radio telescopes on different sides of the globe that are linked to create what's called a Very Long Baseline Interferometer (VLBI) the size of the Earth itself. +14 more See all photos Here a telescope, there a telescope To actually see a satellite image of a brooding and sprawling tropical cyclone is another thing altogether.īut to really capture a direct image of a black hole, or at least the shadow of one outlined by the bright material being pulled toward it, requires some serious collaborative engineering. So that beautiful illustration is kind of like drawing a hurricane based on wind speed data from the outer edges of the storm. The above one comes largely from data gathered by NASA's Chandra X-Ray telescope, which is able to detect the super-heated matter being pulled toward the event horizon, or perimeter of a black hole. This is an illustration of a black hole scientists believe may exist based on data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Telescope and other observatories.Īll these images we've seen from NASA and other scientific organizations are just illustrations created with the help of artists, although many of them are actually based on data from real telescopes. Perhaps you're thinking of something like this: Yes, I know what you're thinking: "I've seen plenty of pictures of black holes." It's a landmark moment for both science and technology made possible by the Event Horizon Telescope, which is actually an array of telescopes spread out across the Earth. They're still processing the data on Sagittarius A*.) (Editors' note, April 10: As it turned out, the black hole image that astronomers released was of the object at the center of the Messier 57 galaxy. That appears set to change Wednesday with the impending release of the first image taken of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Yet despite the hold their inconceivable gravity has on our imaginations, as well as our understanding of physics, humans have never actually seen a black hole. Black holes are some of the most intriguing and mysterious objects in the universe, inspiring entire libraries of both scientific research and science fiction, from Einstein to the movie Interstellar.
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