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Tomorrow (April 10) at 3pm CEST (9am Eastern Time) the first results from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) will be announced:

The scientific mission of the EHT is to capture an image of a black hole horizon. So far, we have indirect evidence for the existence of a black hole horizon, but have not actually “seen” one.


ESO, european organisation for astronomical research in the southern hemisphere.

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Testing these six lenses — the largest of which is 1.1 meters in diameter — will continue for about six weeks at the Mayall Telescope near Tucson, Arizona. It’s part of an effort to get DESI up and running sometime this year.

When complete, DESI will measure the light of tens of millions of galaxies reaching back 12 billion light years. That will enable scientists to 3D map the universe like never before and to measure its expansion. Ultimately, scientists are looking for insight into dark energy, which makes up an estimated 68 percent of the universe and is said to be the force behind its accelerating expansion. Scientists on the research team say they’re just as excited to find what they’re looking for — a better understanding of dark energy — as they are to discover what other mysteries DESI might reveal.

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Today our middle-aged Universe looks eerily smooth. Too smooth, in fact.

While a rapid growth spurt in space-time would explain what we see, science needs more than nice ideas. It needs evidence that whittles away contending arguments. We might finally know where to look for some.

A team of physicists from the Centre for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and Harvard University went back to the drawing board on the early Universe’s evolution to give us a way to help those inflation models stand out from the crowd.

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They’ve captured our imaginations for decades, but we’ve never actually photographed a black hole before – until now.

Next Wednesday, at several press briefings around the world, scientists will apparently unveil humanity’s first-ever photo of a black hole, the European Space Agency said in a statement. Specifically, the photo will be of “Sagittarius A,” the supermassive black hole that’s at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

But aren’t black holes, well, black, and thus invisible, so none of our telescopes can “see” them? Yes – therefore the image we’re likely to see will be of the “event horizon,” the edge of the black hole where light can’t escape.

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