Astronomers May Have Snapped the First Ever Picture of a Black Hole

Astronomers working on the "Event Horizon Telescope" think they may have snapped the first ever picture of a black hole.

Black Hole
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Black Hole

After waiting around for five long ass nights trying to do so, astronomers working on the "Event Horizon Telescope" project think they may have snapped the first ever picture of a black hole. The team involved spent nearly a week observing Sagittarius A*, the astronomical radio source at the center of the Milky Way, which is thought to be home for just that. The project was thwarted a number of times due to bad weather, but they finally concluded (or think the concluded) on Tuesday, April 11.

In case you're wondering just what the hell exactly the "Event Horizon Telescope" is, which is fair, by the way, it's an array of ultra-strong radio observatories stationed around the globe. Combined, they form a virtual telescope with a diameter of 6,200 miles. Scientists pointed those ultra-powerful telescopes at a pair of points in the universe, the aforementioned Sagitarrius A*, as well as at another black hole in the center of M87, a nearby galaxy.

One of the team members on this mission was Radboud University's Heino Falcke. Falcke explained the significance of the images. "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," he said. The picture "will turn black holes from some mythical object to something concrete that we can study."

Even though they took the pictures, it'll still be several months before the team will know for sure if they captured the black hole. That's because the eight observatories that were participating in the project have a massive amount of data to sort through on 1,024 different hard drives. Those drives will have to have their pictures developed at a separate observatory at MIT. In fact, it could take until next year to figure out whether the photos were successfully snapped, since one of the observatories involved is in Antarctica, and can't be flown out of there until October.

According to Engadget/Albert Einsten, the picture (if successfully taken) won't look like that artist rendition at the top of the page, but rather it will show "a crescent of light emitted by gas and dust in the accretion disk surrounding a black circle."

Here's hoping it ends up being time well spent.

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