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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BINGU_PUTHA" data-source="post: 24363232" data-attributes="member: 469273">First time, a black hole is photographed BIG day in astronomyFirst ever black hole image releasedAstronomers have taken the first ever image of a black hole, which is located in a distant galaxy.It  measures 40 billion km across - three million times the size of the  Earth - and has been described by scientists as "a monster".The black hole is 500 million trillion km away and was photographed by a network of eight telescopes across the world. Details have been published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters.Prof  Heino Falcke, of Radboud University in the Netherlands, who proposed  the experiment, told BBC News that the black hole was found in a galaxy  called M87.What we see is larger than the size of our entire Solar System," he said. "It  has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. And it is one of the  heaviest black holes that we think exists. It is an absolute monster,  the heavyweight champion of black holes in the Universe."The image shows an intensely bright "ring of fire", as Prof Falcke  describes it, surrounding a perfectly circular dark hole. The bright  halo is caused by superheated gas falling into the hole. The light is  brighter than all the billions of other stars in the galaxy combined -  which is why it can be seen at such distance from Earth.The edge  of the dark circle at the centre is the point at which the gas enters  the black hole, which is an object that has such a large gravitational  pull, not even light can escape. The image matches what theoretical physicists and indeed, Hollywood  directors, imagined black holes would look like, according to Dr Ziri  Younsi, of University College London - who is part of the collaboration."Although  they are relatively simple objects, black holes raise some of the most  complex questions about the nature of space and time, and ultimately of  our existence," he said."It is remarkable that the image we  observe is so similar to that which we obtain from our theoretical  calculations. So far, it looks like Einstein is correct once again." But  having the first image will enable researchers to learn more about  these mysterious objects. They will be keen to look out for ways in  which the black hole departs from what's expected in physics. No-one  really knows how the bright ring around the hole is created. Even more  intriguing is the question of what happens when an object falls into a  black hole.Prof Falcke had the idea for the project when he was a PhD student in  1993. At the time, no-one thought it was possible. But he was the first  to realise that a certain type of radio emission would be generated  close to and all around the black hole, which would be powerful enough  to be detected by telescopes on Earth. He also recalled reading a  scientific paper from 1973 that suggested that because of their  enormous gravity, black holes appear 2.5 times larger than they actually  are.These two previously unknown factors suddenly made the  seemingly impossible, possible. After arguing his case for 20 years,  Prof Falcke persuaded the <a href="https://blackholecam.org/" target="_blank">European Research Council</a>  to fund the project. The National Science Foundation and agencies in  East Asia then joined in to bankroll the project to the tune of more  than £40m. It is an investment that has been vindicated with the publication of  the image. Prof Falcke told me that he felt that "it's mission  accomplished".He said: "It has been a long journey, but this is what I wanted to see with my own eyes. I wanted to know is this real?"No  single telescope is powerful enough to image the black hole. So, in the  biggest experiment of its kind, Prof Sheperd Doeleman of the  Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, led a project to set up a  network of eight linked telescopes. Together, they form the Event  Horizon Telescope and can be thought of as a planet-sized array of  dishes.Each is located high up at a variety of exotic sites, including on  volcanoes in Hawaii and Mexico, mountains in Arizona and the Spanish  Sierra Nevada, in the Atacama Desert of Chile, and in Antarctica.A team of 200 scientists pointed the networked telescopes towards M87 and scanned its heart over a period of 10 days.The  information they gathered was too much to be sent across the internet.  Instead, the data was stored on hundreds of hard drives that were flown  to a central processing centres in Boston, US, and Bonn, Germany, to  assemble the information. Prof Doeleman described the achievement as "an  extraordinary scientific feat". "We have achieved something presumed to be impossible just a generation ago," he said."Breakthroughs  in technology, connections between the world's best radio  observatories, and innovative algorithms all came together to open an  entirely new window on black holes."The team is also imaging the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Odd  though it may sound, that is harder than getting an image from a  distant galaxy 55 million light-years away. This is because, for some  unknown reason, the "ring of fire" around the black hole at the heart of  the Milky Way is smaller and dimmer. Follow Pallab <a href="http://twitter.com/bbcpallab" target="_blank">on Twitter</a><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00042l4" target="_blank">How to see a Black Hole: The Universe's Greatest Mystery </a>can be seen at 9pm on BBC 4 on Wednesday 10 April.copyright: BBC news</blockquote>

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