![]() While general relativity prevailed again with M87, the EHT image quickly worked its way into the public consciousness. But we haven’t successfully broken general relativity yet.” ![]() “Everybody is always trying to break these theories, because we learn so much when we find a chink in the armor,” says Haggard. The environment around M87’s heart is intense-a hot mess of extreme gravity, magnetic fields, and particles-which makes it one of the best places in the universe to challenge general relativity. M87’s image offered a chance to test Einstein’s 1915 theory of general relativity, which posits that what we perceive as gravity emerges when matter curves the fabric of space-time. When the team released their first image in April 2019, scientists were stunned because the object looked almost exactly as predicted by a century-old theory. Making these images of M87’s supermassive black hole requires combining an enormous amount of data-so much data that the team can’t digitally transfer it and instead has to drop hard drives in the mail. The Event Horizon Telescope actually comprises multiple radio telescopes scattered around the globe, from Greenland to the South Pole, that act together as an Earth-size observatory. ![]() Learn about the types of black holes, how they form, and how scientists discovered these invisible, yet extraordinary objects in our universe. “In the last few years, we went from black holes being science fiction to black holes being reality,” says Marta Volonteri of the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris.Īt the center of our galaxy, a supermassive black hole churns. But these cosmic sinkholes have only recently come into focus, thanks to the EHT image, as well as Nobel-prize winning studies of objects zipping around the supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way and a wealth of information gleaned from watching as black holes smash into one another. “And the more sites you have, the lower the probability of good weather at each of them.” A cosmic crullerīlack holes have been among the more intriguing, compelling astronomical phenomena for more than a century, capturing our imaginations with their extreme physics and the fact that what goes in never comes back out. “You need to have really good weather at all sites,” says Radboud University’s Monika Moscibrodzka. This time around, the collaboration has added three new telescopes to its retinue of observatories, including a facility in Greenland, and it is again scanning the sky in wavelengths spanning the electromagnetic spectrum-as long as the weather cooperates. Now the EHT team is in the midst of a crucial 12-day observing run-the first they’ve been able to do since 2018, due to technical problems and the coronavirus pandemic. “I feel like this is at the beginning of everything.” “I think this is one of the papers that really connects EHT to the rest of the community-it’s a taste of what the facility really is meant to do,” adds team member Sera Markoff of the University of Amsterdam. “We’re really starting to see orbits, we’re seeing right down next to the black hole and probing this exotic environment.” “This is the kitchen sink of physics, right? Everything is in there,” says McGill University’s Daryl Haggard, who helped coordinate the multiwavelength observations. It describes a more complete view of the supermassive black hole and its massive jet, letting scientists take a good look at how magnetic fields, particles, gravity, and radiation interact within the vicinity of a supermassive black hole on multiple scales. The report, which appears today in The Astrophysical Journal, includes data from 19 Earth- and space-based observatories, and is authored by more than 750 scientists. ![]() Two years later, the international team that delivered the astounding image, along with additional partners, has published the results of a 2017 observing campaign that simultaneously scrutinized the host galaxy, Messier 87, in multiple wavelengths. Using an array called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), scientists harnessed radio waves to capture a mugshot of that black hole, offering our first-ever look at the extreme environment near its edge in 2019. In the heart of a gargantuan galaxy 55 million light-years away, a black hole with the heft of 6.5 billion suns is hurling a fountain of matter into the cosmos at near light-speed.
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