This image may not be used by or to promote the arms, nuclear power or tobacco industries or any religious organisation, or in any discriminatory way,
This image may not be used by or to promote the arms, nuclear power or tobacco industries or any religious organisation, or in any discriminatory way, or to imply the endorsement by ESO of any product, service or activity First image of a black hole, Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) image. This is the first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the centre of the galaxy Messier 87 and its shadow. The shadow of a black hole is the closest it is possible to come to an image of the black hole itself, as it is a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole's boundary, the event horizon, from which the EHT takes its name, is around times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across. The EHT is a global array of eight ground-based radio telescopes that was designed to capture images of a black hole. The observations for this image were collected at a wavelength of mm during 2017. The data from all eight telescopes were combined on supercomputers at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, Germany, and the MIT Haystack Observatory, USA, and then painstakingly converted into a single image using novel computational tools developed by the collaboration.
Size: 7416px × 4320px
Photo credit: © EHT Collaboration/EUROPEAN SOUTHERN OBSERVATORY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: -, 1st, 2000s, 2010s, 2019, 21st, 87, accretion, array, astronomical, astronomy, astrophysical, astrophysics, background, black, center, centre, century, collaboration, disc, disk, dust, eht, event, galactic, gas, global, hole, horizon, m87*, messier, network, radiation, shadow, space, telescope, universe, virgo
