This image shows the large black hole in the centre of another galaxy called M87, which is 55 million light years away. Details have been published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters.It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of eight linked telescopes.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. Instead, the data was stored on hundreds of hard drives that were flown to central processing centres in Boston, US, and Bonn, Germany, to assemble the information. "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 eventual EHT array will have 12 widely spaced participating radio facilities The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, controls Chandra's science and flight operations.Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Villanova University/J. Prof Doeleman described the achievement as "an extraordinary scientific feat". On behalf of the EHT's Multiwavelength Working Group, Dr. Joey Neilsen of Villanova University and his collaborators put in a request for Director's Discretionary Time to observe M87 simultaneously with the EHT, and received nearly 30,000 seconds of observing time during April 2017.Neilsen, Villanova undergraduate student Jadyn Anczarski, and their collaborators used Chandra and NuSTAR to measure the X-ray brightness of the jet, a data point that EHT scientists used to evaluate their models of the jet.
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 factors suddenly made the seemingly impossible, possible. 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. Without her contribution the project would not have been possible. Astronomers have suspected that the M87 galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its heart from false colour images such as this one. "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. "The team is also imaging the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The black hole at the center of M87, on the other hand, is a whopping 1,000 times bigger than our own, but it also sits roughly 2,000 times farther away. Chandra has studied M87 many times over its 20-year mission and sees a much wider field-of-view than the EHT. Can data from Chandra and NASA's NuSTAR observatory help play a role in determining more about the physics in this environment?M87 is an elliptical galaxy in the Virgo galaxy cluster, about 60 million light years away from Earth. The point of no return: In astronomy, it’s known as a black hole — a region in space where the pull of gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. The "monster" black hole is three million times the size of Earth. 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. This jet, seen in detail from Chandra in the inset, extends more than 1,000 light years from the center of the galaxy. 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. This black hole is located in Messier 87, or M87, which is about 60 million light years from Earth. Chandra has a much larger field of view than the EHT, so it can view the full length of the jet of high-energy particles launched by the intense gravitational and magnetic fields around the black hole at M87. 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. It is an absolute monster, the heavyweight champion of black holes in the Universe. Using the Event Horizon Telescope, an international team of scientists has for the first time measured the radius of a black hole at the center of M87, a galaxy some 50 million light years from the Milky Way.. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of radio antennae around the globe, has captured the first image of a black hole event horizon.