"You can see that one side of that ring is brighter than the other, and that's the side that's coming towards us as the whole thing spins," explained University of Queensland astrophysicist Professor Tamara Davis. It's surrounded by a swirling disc of gas, which gets superheated and emits bright radio waves as it accelerates towards the event horizon - getting very, very close to the speed of light. The bright ring in the image is caused by the incredible pull the black hole exerts on nearby matter. Loading Twitter content What exactly are we looking at? The finding is also described in a series of six research papers, all published today in a special issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. Nobody outside the project knew exactly what they would be announcing, but they had declared it was "a groundbreaking result". This week, after two years of analysis, the EHT team called their global press conference. The files were so large they were too big for the internet team members had to carry their findings around the world on hard drives. Over several nights in April 2017, the EHT turned its dishes towards M87 and collected vast quantities of data. Their other target - the subject of Wednesday's image - is much bigger, but also much further away, at the centre of the nearby galaxy M87.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |