Black hole image: Scientists reveal first ever photo from Event Horizon telescope – as it happened
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Your support makes all the difference.An international scientific team on Wednesday announced a milestone in astrophysics - the first-ever photo of a black hole - using a global network of telescopes to gain insight into celestial objects with gravitational fields so strong no matter or light can escape.
The research was conducted by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, an international collaboration begun in 2012 to try to directly observe the immediate environment of a black hole using a global network of Earth-based telescopes. The announcement was made in simultaneous news conferences in Washington, Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo.
The image reveals the black hole at the centre of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides about 54 million light-years from Earth.
Black holes, phenomenally dense celestial entities, are extraordinarily difficult to observe despite their great mass. A black hole's event horizon is the point of no return beyond which anything - stars, planets, gas, dust and all forms of electromagnetic radiation - gets swallowed into oblivion.
"This is a huge day in astrophysics," said US National Science Foundation Director France Cardova. "We're seeing the unseeable."
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Among other things, today is an uncanny reminder that all of those beautiful pictures of black holes we've seen before were just imaginings by artists. Here's an appreciation of some of them, courtesy of Nasa, before we finally get to look at the real thing (in about 25 minutes).
Ten minutes until everything kicks off. Strangely, astronomers keep referring to the time 3.07pm CEST – so it's possible we'll have seven minutes or so of introduction and then we'll get to see the actual thing. Still, not long now!
I think the best stream is probably going to be this one, on YouTube, if you want to watch along at home:
(EUTube! Can you believe we voted to leave these guys.)
My guess on how this is going to go down: on the hour, the event will start; seven minutes of waffle; then we'll get to see the picture; then the scientists will go in detail into how this picture was taken and what it tells us about the universe. And we'll be here to go through that with you!
Scientists confirm it is the first ever picture of a black hole that we're seeing here. (We've not seen it yet.)
"We are about to take a picture. A picture of something that one man, one man alone, dreamt ... Albert Einstein."
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