On April 10, 2019 the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team unveiled humanity’s first image of a supermassive black hole –described as the Gates of Hell and the End of Spacetime– the picture of galaxy Messier 87’s central supermassive black hole –a monster the size of our solar system. The April event was as epic as the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, with the world viewing its first image of what had once been purely theoretical, the black hole at the heart of galaxy M87. Now, moving beyond photons, astronomers are using the echoes of X-ray radiation to map the dynamic behavior and surroundings of a black hole.
Our knowledge of black holes has grown exponentially since Princeton quantum physicist John Wheeler first named these enigmatic monsters in 1967, observing that “the laws of physics that we regard as ‘sacred,’ as immutable, are anything but.” Observations have shown that stellar black holes typically have masses of about ten times that of the Sun, in accordance with the theory of stellar evolution. But a Chinese team of astronomers recently claimed to have discovered a black hole as massive as 70 solar masses, which, if confirmed, would severely challenge the current view of stellar evolution.
Today’s “Galaxy Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our knowledge of the Milky Way and the Universe beyond.
“One of the unbreakable laws of physics is that nothing can move faster than the speed of light,” said Brad Snios with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics about results of new research of the iconic M87 black hole jet in radio, optical, and X-ray light. “We haven’t broken physics, but we have found an example of an amazing phenomenon called superluminal motion.”
This past April 2019, with an event that was as epic as the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, the world viewed its first image of what had once been purely theoretical, a black hole at the heart of galaxy M87, frozen in time it was 55 million years ago, the size of our solar system, and bigger, with the mass of six and a half billion suns that was captured by a lens the size of planet Earth and 4,000 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope. Over those eons its light took to reach us, said astrophysicist Janna Levin at Columbia University, “we emerged on Earth along with our myths, differentiated cultures, ideologies, languages and varied beliefs,” (more…)
“It’s like a crime scene investigation. The case involves an explosion, a suspect, and various pieces of circumstantial evidence,” said Matthias Kadler, astrophysicist at the University of Würzburg in Germany about the event that occurred on Sept. 22, 2017, when a ghostly particle ejected from a distant supermassive black hole sneaked through the ice of Antarctica at just below the speed of light, with an energy of some 300 trillion electron volts, nearly 50 times the energy delivered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the biggest particle accelerator on Earth.