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First Photo of a Black Hole May Be Revealed. Here’s How to Follow the Announcement. - The New York Times

At 9 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, a group of astronomers who run a globe-girdling network of radio telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope are expected to unveil the first-ever images of a black hole.

For some years now, scientific literature, news media and films have featured remarkably sophisticated and academic computer simulations of black holes. If all has gone well, the images today will reveal the real thing, and scientists at last will catch a glimpse of what had seemed unseeable.

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A number of news conferences are being held around the world. You can watch one news conference on the National Science Foundation’s website, or in the video player embedded below.

Black holes are objects so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape from their gravity. They were predicted by the equations of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, as solved by the German physicist Karl Schwarzschild in 1915. That theory ascribes gravity to the warping of space and time by matter and energy, much as a mattress sags under a sleeper.

To Einstein’s surprise, the equations indicated that when too much matter or energy was concentrated in one place, space-time could collapse, trapping matter and light in perpetuity. Einstein disliked that idea, but the consensus today is that the universe is speckled with black holes waiting for something to fall in. Many are the gravitational tombstones of stars that have burned up their fuel and collapsed. Others, millions or billions times more massive than the sun, lurk at the centers of galaxies.

Actual images would provide a final, ringing affirmation of an idea so disturbing that even Einstein, from whose equations black holes emerged, was loath to accept it.

Astrophysicists think that supermassive black holes are the engines that generate the prodigious energies of quasars and other explosive galactic nuclei. Doomed, superheated gas swirls around the hole, like water around a drain, and is forced out the sides as an enormous cosmic blowtorch. Today’s images could show how this process works.

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Dr. Shep Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope, in 2015 working inside the Large Millimeter Telescope in Pico de Orizaba National Park near Puebla, Mexico.CreditMeridith Kohut for The New York Times

One of the objects the astronomers studied, known as Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star) sits at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, buried in the depths of interstellar dust and gas. It is equivalent in mass to 4.1 million suns that otherwise have disappeared from the visible universe.

Another is in the center of Messier 87, a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo that has a jet of energy some 5,000 light years long shooting out of it.

It might be circular, oval or some other shape entirely, depending on whether it is rotating, or if the Einsteinian equations describing it are slightly wrong, or if it is spitting flares of energy, which is how quasars produce fireworks visible across the universe.

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The Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Atacama, Chile, one of several telescopes across the globe that make up the Event Horizon Telescope, below the southern sky.CreditY. Beletsky (LCO)/ESO

The images emerged from two years of computer analysis of observations from a network of radio antennas called the Event Horizon Telescope. In all, eight radio observatories on six mountains and four continents observed the Sagittarius and Virgo black holes on and off for 10 days in April of 2017.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/science/black-hole-picture.html

2019-04-10 09:00:11Z
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