What The Event Horizon Telescope Reveals About Galaxy M87

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

A massive international collaboration of researchers has released the first-ever direct image of the hellish environment surrounding a supermassive black hole. As part of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, the team used a global array of telescopes to probe the fiery disk of material swirling around the gargantuan black hole at the center of the galaxy M87. The results confirm that the hot gas swirling around a black hole is traveling at nearly the speed of light, creating a chaot ...read more

Event Horizon Telescope Releases Humanity’s First Ever Black Hole Image

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

On Wednesday, astronomers revealed the first image ever taken of a black hole, bringing a dramatic conclusion to a decades-long effort. The iconic image offers humanity its first glimpse at the gas and debris that swirl around its event horizon, the point beyond which material disappears forever. A favorite object of science fiction has finally been made real on screen. Their target was a nearby galaxy dubbed M87 and its supermassive black hole, which packs the mass of six and half billio ...read more

The Event Horizon Telescope: How It Works

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

A black hole isn't an easy thing to photograph. The famously inscrutable objects are so dense that even light can’t escape their vicinity. By definition, they are invisible. So when the Event Horizon Telescope team released the first image of a black hole, but what they really released is an image of the black hole’s event horizon — the minimum distance from the black hole’s center where gravity is still weak enough for light to escape. And how they imaged the super ...read more

Inside The Event Horizon Telescope’s Quixotic Quest to Image a Black Hole

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Trying to take a picture of a black hole — an object that is, by definition, invisible—sounds like an exercise in futility. But for decades, theoreticians suspected it may just be possible to get a detailed view of a black hole’s perimeter, right up to the edge of the event horizon, the fabled point of no return. And a core group of astronomers spent years trying to turn that prediction into reality. Now, they finally have. Astronomers announced Wednesday that they’d cap ...read more

It Took 10 Million Years for Biodiversity to Recover From Dino-killing Impact

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Some 66 million years ago, a city-sized asteroid struck off the coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, killing 75 percent of life on Earth, including the non-avian dinosaurs. The space rock left a roughly 100-mile-wide crater and destroyed global ecosystems. Now, a new study shows that it took more than 10 million years of evolution before biodiversity recovered. And the scientists behind the study say their find carries a grave warning for our current era of human-caused extinction, d ...read more