WASHINGTON — Astronomers said Wednesday that they captured the first image of a black hole, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of an unseeable cosmic object and its shadow.
An Earth-sized virtual telescope called Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) linking eight ground-based radio telescopes around the globe “saw” the black hole at the center of massive galaxy M87, 55 million light-years from Earth with a mass 6.5-billion times that of the Sun.
At the press conference, scientists revealed a donut-like structure with a dark central region and a bright ring, which is the black hole’s shadow against a disc of glowing gas that falls onto the black hole.
The landmark result offers scientists a new way to study the most extreme objects in the universe predicted by Albert Einstein’s general relativity.
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