So, this is what a black hole looks like

After a decade long attempt, it’s finally happened. We now have the first real image of a black hole. It’s not as majestic as the one in Interstellar but it’s still an impressive feat nonetheless. The snapshot was taken of a supermassive black hole in the Messier 87 galaxy, which is around 55 million light years away. It’s a massive one indeed as its mass is 6.5 billion times that of our Sun. What was captured was the “shadow” created as the event horizon bends and sucks in light.

To get the image, it took eight existing high-altitude telescopes to reach an angular resolution that’s enough to capture what’s considered a relatively compact object (at “just” 24.9 billion miles across) at an extreme distance. There was a need to synchronize atomic clocks and use supercomputers to combine petabytes of raw data from the telescopes. In the future, we’re expected to see and learn more with the Event Horizon Telescope adding the Greenland Telescope, IRAM NOEMA Observatory, and Kitt Peak Telescopes joining the array.

Source: Engadget