by Maddie Robin ![]() The first ever photo of a black hole, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope. In April of 2017, scientists captured the first ever photo of a black hole, the supermassive one that lies in the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, 55 million light years away from Earth. The black hole has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. Although black holes are invisible, there is a point, known as the event horizon, where matter and energy can no longer escape. This is what researchers captured in the images we see today.
The photo was only unveiled to the rest of the world recently, by astronomers working on the Event Horizon Telescope, which helped to capture the images. The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, called EHT, is a global network of telescopes with more than 200 researchers who have worked on this project for over a decade to capture these unprecedented images. Researchers used eight telescopes around the world with Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), which creates a virtual telescope that is equal in size to the Earth. All sorts of different types of telescopes were used to create the global collection, including the James Clerk Maxwell telescope, the Submillimeter Array, and many more. According to Daniel Marrone, an associate professor of astronomy, it was a very difficult process to get the image; they had to simultaneously point the telescopes in a carefully planned sequence. They used atomic clocks, an extremely accurate type of clock, to make sure it was completely simultaneous. The telescopes collected 5,000 trillion bytes of data over just two weeks, which scientist processed through supercomputers to retrieve the photos. The details of the observations were published in six different research papers that were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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