After very long five nights, a group of talented astronomers working on the Event Horizon Telescope project may have just took the very first picture of a black hole ever.
Right now the data that was gathered by the project telescopes is being sent to supercomputers across the U.S and Germany to be analyzed, but the team seem to think they finally made it and got the very first photo of what is known as a Black Hole.
Most people think that black holes are very black right? Given the name that makes sense, the reality is that they are more likely very very very dark blue
” Even if the first images are still crappy and washed out, they can already test for the first time some basic predictions of Einstein’s theory of gravity in the extreme environment of a black hole. The picture will turn black holes from some mythical objects to something concrete that we can study ”
Said one of the team members who worked on this mission, Heino Falcke from Radboud University
It’s interesting to know that the techniques used in the Event Horizon Telescope are considered old, but the size and massive scale of this mission will blow your mind. Think about this:
The telescope can actually count the stitches on a baseball from a distance of 8,000 miles away. Pretty sick right?
During this mission, the astronomers actually managed to reach two black holes. The first one was Sagittarius A*, which is a black hole that sits just at the center of the Milky Way, and the other one was Messier 87, which is a black hole in the elliptical galaxy 53 million light years away.
We would actually be able to see the real first picture of a black hole early next year…keep your fingers crossed
