First image of blackhole
The Event Horizon Telescope captured the first actual image of the massive object. The 2020 Nobel Prize went to three researchers whose pioneering observations and analysis all but confirmed the presence of a supermassive black hole. Analyzing those trajectories, astronomers conclude the unseen black hole has the mass of 4 million suns. An animation shows how the gravity of the Milky Way's central black hole warps the trajectories of nearby stars. The motions of stars in the dust-shrouded core of the Milky Way near Sgr A* have been closely monitored for the past two decades, allowing astronomers to calculate the mass of the invisible body warping their trajectories. Light that is too close to the black hole, close enough to be swallowed by it, eventually crosses its horizon and leaves behind just the dark void in the center."īy definition, black holes cannot be directly observed because nothing, not even light, can escape the crushing inward force of their titanic gravity.īut their presence can be indirectly detected by observing the effects of that gravity on the trajectories of nearby stars and by the radiation emitted across the electromagnetic spectrum by material heated to extreme temperatures as it's sucked into a rapidly rotating "accretion disk" and then into the hole itself. "Light escaping from the hot gas swirling around the black hole appears to us as the bright ring. Its enormous gravity pulls surrounding material into a disc, accelerating it to nearly the speed of light and heating it to extreme temperatures, resulting in torrents of radiation that can be seen from Earth. The 2019 target was a mind boggling black hole at the core of M-87, a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo, a hole with the mass of 6.5 billion suns.
"And it is teeming with activity, always burbling with turbulent energy and occasionally erupting into bright flares of emission." The black hole at the center of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*. "We are peering into a new environment, the curved spacetime near a supermassive black hole," said Michael Johnson, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. They picked the wrong astrophysicist.Three years after capturing the first image of a supermassive black hole in a galaxy 55 million light years away, astronomers have managed to "photograph" the gaping maw of the smaller but much closer black hole quietly lurking at the core of the Milky Way, researchers announced Thursday. That same day, The Washington Post published an article about the online controversy surrounding Bouman's work titled " Trolls hijacked a scientist’s image to attack Katie Bouman. On April 12th, Redditor DankMemesKing777 posted an edited version of the photo with Minecraft on her computer screen to /r/ dankmemes, where it gained over 54,200 points (93% upvoted) and 560 comments.
First image of blackhole software#
(1/7) So apparently some (I hope very few) people online are using the fact that I am the primary developer of the eht-imaging software library ( ) to launch awful and sexist attacks on my colleague and friend Katie Bouman.
That day, Chael posted a thread on Twitter condemning "sexist attacks" on Bouman (shown below).
First image of blackhole code#
He wrote 850,000 of the 900,000 lines of code that were written in the historic black hole image algorithm" to /r/pics, which was subsequently deleted for having an "inappropriate title." The following day, Redditor SmellyTheBluCow submitted a post titled "Katie Bouman should not be getting credit for the picture if the black hole" to /r/unpopularopinion, citing the project's GitHub page showing that programmers Andrew Chael and Michael Johnson contributed a majority of commits. Meanwhile, a post titled "This is Andrew Chael. That day, Redditor GrumpyWendigo posted the photo to /r/photoshopbattles, where numerous edited examples were submitted in the comments.