{"id":89387,"date":"2019-04-10T06:42:29","date_gmt":"2019-04-10T13:42:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/astronomers-capture-first-image-of-a-black-hole"},"modified":"2019-04-10T06:42:29","modified_gmt":"2019-04-10T13:42:29","slug":"astronomers-capture-first-image-of-a-black-hole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/astronomers-capture-first-image-of-a-black-hole","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers Capture First Image of a Black Hole"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/astronomers-capture-first-image-of-a-black-hole3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) \u2014 a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration \u2014 was designed to capture images of a black hole. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.<\/p>\n<p>This breakthrough was announced today in a series of six papers published in a special issue of <em> The Astrophysical Journal Letters<\/em>. The image reveals the black hole at the centre of Messier 87 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eso.org\/public\/news\/eso1907\/#1\">[1]<\/a>, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eso.org\/public\/news\/eso1907\/#2\">[2]<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The EHT links telescopes around the globe to form an unprecedented Earth-sized virtual telescope <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eso.org\/public\/news\/eso1907\/#3\">[3]<\/a>. The EHT offers scientists a new way to study the most extreme objects in the Universe predicted by Einstein\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/General_relativity\">general relativity<\/a> during the centenary year of the historic experiment that first confirmed the theory <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eso.org\/public\/news\/eso1907\/#4\">[4]<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.eso.org\/public\/news\/eso1907\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><\/p>\n<div style=\"clear:both;\">Read more<\/div>\n<p><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) \u2014 a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration \u2014 was designed to capture images of a black hole. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":354,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,1522],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-innovation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/354"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89387\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}