Picture of a black hole3/26/2023 The researchers from the different observatories divided into four teams and worked independently, sharing no information among themselves about preliminary results, lest they influence or contaminate one another’s data. The collection of the data was completed in barely a week, but the collation and analysis of it took the better part of the past two years. “This team took that concept to a global scale.” “More than five decades ago, this concept, called very long baseline interferometry, was developed,” said France Cordova, Director of the National Science Foundation, which coordinates the EHT. north-south stretch from Spain to Antarctica - effectively means a collection dish nearly as big as the Earth itself. The distance among the detectors - especially the 9,000-mi. One thing that made the work possible was not just the number of telescopes collaborating in the search, but their geographic distribution. ![]() Never mind the orange on the moon, Doeleman said: “This is the equivalent of being able to read the date on a quarter in Los Angeles, standing here in Washington, D.C.” But at 2,700 times the distance, it was even harder to see. The black hole at the center of M87, by contrast, has a mass equivalent to 6.5 billion suns, or 1,585 times bigger than our own black hole. (A picture of Sagittarius A* was not released Wednesday, but will be in the future.) Trying to take an image of that from the 26,000 light year distance at which the Earth sits from the center of the Milky Way is like trying to spot an orange on the surface of the moon-with the naked eye. It measures perhaps 24 million miles across, or about a 50 billionth the size of the galaxy. ![]() While that earns it the sobriquet “supermassive black hole” (more common black holes can be as small as five solar masses), it’s actually something of a pipsqueak as these things go. It has a mass equivalent to about 4.1 million of our suns. ![]() The black hole at the center of our galaxy goes by the name Sagittarius A*. “Our first three days of observing were some of the best we’ve ever seen.” “We were very lucky,” said University of Arizona astronomer Dan Marrone, of the EHT team.
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