Astronomers believe that they have succeeded in taking the first-ever image of a black hole — or, more precisely, of its event horizon. On Wednesday, scientists associated with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a collaboration that uses network of telescopes spread across the globe to create an Earth-sized telescope — said that after five nights of observations, they may have snapped a photograph of the supermassive black hole residing in our galaxy’s heart.
The staggering amount of data collected during the observations has been recorded on over 1,000 hard drives, and the first images of the black hole Sagittarius A* — a behemoth 4 million times the mass of our sun — will emerge either late this year or early next year.
“Even if the first images are still crappy and washed out, we can already test for the first time some basic predictions of Einstein’s theory of gravity in the extreme environment of a black hole,” Heino Falcke, a radio astronomer from the University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands who was involved in the project, told National Geographic magazine.
The Emergency Election Sale is now live! Get 30% to 60% off our most popular products today!