It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an array which linked together eight existing radio observatories across the planet to form a single “Earth-sized” virtual telescope. The telescope is named after the “event horizon”, the boundary of the black hole beyond which no light can escape.
That telescope network is called the Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT. It also produced the first image of a black hole, released in 2019. That object sits at the center of the galaxy M87. It's about 55 million light-years from Earth.
Black holes themselves cannot be seen: their gravitational fields are so strong that nothing can escape them—including light. That is why their edges are called event horizons, because, much like with normal horizons, seeing beyond them is impossible.
In its sonifications of the black hole in the M87 galaxy, which was first imaged in 2019, NASA created audio using X-ray, optical light and radio wave data from ground and space telescopes.
Over the course of 10 days in April 2017, telescopes in North America, South America, Hawaii, Europe and Antarctica collectively zoomed in on the galactic center and other black holes, gathering 65 hours of data on 1,024 eight-terabyte hard drives, which were shipped to supercomputer banks in Massachusetts and Germany ...
One hour for a black hole observer would equate to 100,000,000 years for a person on Earth. Therefore one minute in a black hole would be roughly 1,700,000 years.
“We have images for two black holes — one at the large end and one at the small end of supermassive black holes in the Universe — so we can go a lot further in testing how gravity behaves in these extreme environments than ever before.”
We can't see them, but we know that black holes can exist thanks to the groundwork laid by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. A black hole forms when the mass of an object, like a star, suddenly collapses down to a tiny volume. A small object with a large mass causes a gaping dent in space-time.
In 2003, astronomers detected something truly astonishing: acoustic waves propagating through the copious amounts of gas surrounding the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Perseus galaxy cluster, which is now renowned for its eerie wails. We wouldn't be able to hear them at their current pitch.
Fortunately, this has never happened to anyone — black holes are too far away to pull in any matter from our solar system.
The project cost nearly $60 million with $28 million coming from the U.S. National Science Foundation.
The first image of the black hole M87* was obtained by three-year observations using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). The picture was published in 2019 and it was a real sensation in the world of science. The scientists used an algorithm to fill in the gaps and compile a huge dataset into a single image.
At best, NASA's Chandra telescope orbiting Earth has spotted the bright X-rays flaring around the black hole. For any individual telescope, getting a clear close-up image of a black hole is impossible.
So in our region of the Universe, there are some 100 billion supermassive black holes. The nearest one resides in the center of our Milky Way galaxy, 28 thousand lightyears away. The most distant we know of lives in a quasar galaxy billions of lightyears away.
Of course, no matter what type of black hole you fall into, you're ultimately going to get torn apart by the extreme gravity. No material, especially fleshy human bodies, could survive intact. So once you pass beyond the edge of the event horizon, you're done.
Anything that passes the event horizon is trapped within the black hole. But right as gas and dust get closer and closer to the event horizon, the gravity from the black hole makes them spin really fast … forming lots of radiation.
Anything outside this surface —including astronauts, rockets, or light—can escape from the black hole. But once this surface is crossed, nothing can escape, regardless of its speed, because of the strong gravitational pull toward the center of the black hole.
If black holes evaporate under Hawking radiation, a solar mass black hole will evaporate over 1064 years which is vastly longer than the age of the universe. A supermassive black hole with a mass of 1011 (100 billion) M ☉ will evaporate in around 2×10100 years.
Astronomers have discovered the nearest known black hole to Earth, and it's twice as close as the previous record holder. The space-time singularity, named Gaia BH1, is 1,566 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus and is roughly 10 times more massive than our sun.
According to our best theory of gravity, Einstein's theory of general relativity, your spaghettified body would eventually end up at a 'singularity' – an infinitely small and dense point at the 'bottom' of the black hole.
Wormholes are shortcuts in spacetime, popular with science fiction authors and movie directors. They've never been seen, but according to Einstein's general theory of relativity, they might exist.
In a new study, Stanford physicists Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin have calculated the number of all possible universes, coming up with an answer of 10^10^16.
Located just under 1,600 light-years away, the discovery suggests there might be a sizable population of dormant black holes in binary systems. The black hole Gaia BH1, seen in this artist's concept near its Sun-like companion star, is the closest black hole to Earth discovered so far.
Only 23 people had survived. When news of the 'Black Hole' reached London, a relief expedition led by Robert Clive was immediately assembled and subsequently arrived in Calcutta in October. After a prolonged siege, Fort William fell to the British in January 1757.
Black holes themselves are entirely dark and featureless. The giant ones at the centers of galaxies are also surprisingly small, despite containing millions or billions of times the mass of our sun. To make observing them yet more difficult, those giants are shrouded in clouds of dust and gas.