But it’s also about 1,000 times as massive as the Milky Way’s giant. M87’s black hole sits about 55 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. But, the scientists found it easier to image M87’s monster, even though it’s about 2,000 times as far away as Sgr A*. That second supermassive black hole sits at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Now, they finally know the answer.ĮHT trained its sights on both M87’s black hole and Sagittarius A*. Scientists have been speculating for years about what a black hole would actually look like. “M87 is a monster even by supermassive black hole standards,” Markoff said. Its diameter stretches 38 billion kilometers (24 billion miles). The team also has figured out the behemoth’s size. New EHT measurements show that the mass of this black hole is about 6.5 billion solar masses. Estimates made using different techniques have ranged between 3.5 billion and 7.22 billion times the mass of the sun. She’s a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. “Our mass determination by just directly looking at the shadow has helped resolve a longstanding controversy,” Sera Markoff said in the Washington, D.C., news conference. The new image provided a new measurement of the size and heft of M87’s black hole. This theory describes physics on very small scales. That’s because it’s incompatible with another essential physics theory, quantum mechanics. However, she adds, just because this first image upholds general relativity “doesn’t mean general relativity is completely fine.” Many physicists think that general relativity won’t be the last word on gravity. So testing general relativity in such extreme conditions could reveal things that don’t seem to support Einstein’s predictions.Įxplainer: Quantum is the world of the super small She is an astrophysicist who works at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “Black hole environments are a likely place where general relativity would break down,” says EHT team member Feryal Özel. And then you’d be unable to report back on the results of any experiments. Tiptoe any closer and you’d be inside the black hole. Studies in the past have tested general relativity by looking at the motions of stars or gas clouds near a black hole, but never at its edge. He’s a physicist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who is not on the EHT team. “Being able to actually see this shadow and to detect it is a tremendous first step.” And that, of course, helps verify general relativity,” says Clifford Will. The picture is “one more strong piece of evidence supporting the existence of black holes. That theory predicts how spacetime is warped by the extreme mass of a black hole. The new image aligns with what physicists expected a black hole to look like based on the theory of general relativity by Albert Einstein. “It really brings home how fortunate we are as a species at this particular time, with the capacity of the human mind to comprehend the universe, to have built all the science and technology to make it happen.” Einstein was right This astrophysicist at Yale University, in New Haven, Conn., is not on the EHT team. The much-anticipated big reveal of the image “lives up to the hype, that’s for sure,” says Priyamvada Natarajan. “It was just astonishment and wonder… to know that you’ve uncovered a part of the universe that was off limits to us.” “It’s been such a buildup,” Doeleman said. It unveils for the first time the dark abyss of one of the universe’s most mysterious objects. The EHT image reveals the shadow of M87’s black hole on its accretion disk. That disk looks like a fuzzy, asymmetrical ring. They gather bright disks of gas and other material that surrounds the black hole. But some black holes, especially supermassive ones dwelling in galaxies’ centers, stand out. Their gravity is so extreme that nothing, not even light, can escape across the boundary at a black hole’s edge. That’s because black holes are famously hard to see. Chris Mihos/Case Western Reserve Univ., ESO
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