Event horizon telescope images11/5/2023 ![]() “This is the first image where we are able to pin down where the ring is, relative to the powerful jet escaping out of the central black hole,” says Kazunori Akiyama, a research scientist at MIT’s Haystack Observatory, who developed the imaging software used to visualize the black hole. The scientists tracked these emissions back toward the black hole and observed for the first time that the base of the jet appears to connect to the central ring. The images also reveal plasma trailing out from the central ring, which scientists believe to be part of a relativistic jet blasting out from the black hole. This larger ring is a reflection of the telescope array’s resolution, which was tuned to pick up more of the super-hot, glowing plasma surrounding the black hole.įor the first time, scientists could see that part of the black hole’s ring consists of plasma from a surrounding accretion disk - a swirling pancake of white-hot electrons that the team estimates is being heated to billions of degrees Celsius as the plasma streams into the black hole at close to the speed of light. The new images, taken one year after the EHT’s initial observations, reveal a thicker, fluffier ring that is 50 percent larger than the ring that was first reported. The team, including scientists at MIT’s Haystack Observatory, has harnessed another global web of observatories - the Global Millimeter VLBI Array (GMVA) - to capture a more zoomed-out view of the black hole. The telescope’s laser-focused resolution revealed a very thin glowing ring around a dark center, representing the first visual of a black hole’s shadow.Īstronomers have now refocused their view to capture a new layer of M87*. ![]() The synchronized network, known collectively as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), focused in on M87*, the black hole at the center of the nearby Messier 87 galaxy. In 2017, astronomers captured the first image of a black hole by coordinating radio dishes around the world to act as a single, planet-sized telescope.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |