200 most important Astronomy topics - Sykalo Eugen 2023

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) First Results

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a huge telescope network that was designed to capture an image of a black hole's event horizon, which is the point of no return beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape. The EHT project was launched in 2012, and it involved more than 200 scientists from around the world. In April 2019, the EHT team announced their first results, which gave us a glimpse into the mysterious world of black holes.

What is a black hole?

A black hole is a region of space with an incredibly strong gravitational pull that nothing can escape from, not even light. Black holes are formed when a massive star collapses in on itself, creating a region of space with a gravitational pull so strong that it warps the fabric of space and time around it.

What is the Event Horizon Telescope?

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is not a single telescope but a network of radio telescopes located all over the world. The EHT works by combining the data collected by each of these telescopes to create a virtual telescope the size of the Earth. This virtual telescope is powerful enough to capture an image of a black hole's event horizon.

What did the EHT team discover?

In April 2019, the EHT team announced that they had successfully captured an image of the event horizon of a black hole located in the galaxy M87, which is about 55 million light-years away from Earth. The image shows a bright ring of light around a dark center, which is the black hole itself.

The image of the black hole was incredibly significant because it confirmed the existence of black holes and gave us a glimpse into the mysterious world beyond the event horizon. The image also provided scientists with a wealth of data that will be studied for years to come.

What can we learn from the EHT results?

The EHT results confirmed some of the predictions made by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes how gravity works in the universe. The image of the black hole also provided scientists with new insights into how black holes work and how they shape the universe around them.

One of the most significant findings from the EHT results was that the black hole in M87 is much larger than scientists had previously believed. It has a mass equivalent to 6.5 billion suns, which is about 1,000 times larger than the black hole at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.