Harvard scientists lead team revealing black hole

Wednesday, April 10, 2019 - 08:40 in Astronomy & Space

A global team of astronomers, led by Harvard scientists, have, for the first time, captured an image of a black hole. The image is the result of a colossal, years-long effort by dozens of researchers. To find it, the EHT focused on a pair of supermassive black holes — the one at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, known as Sagittarius A* (pronounced Sagittarius A-star), and a second that lies at the heart of an elliptical galaxy called M87. Capturing an image of a black hole, project leaders said, is about more than getting the first glimpse of one of the most curious objects in the cosmos. It also opens the door to allowing astronomers and physicists to test Einstein’s theories of gravity and general relativity under the most extreme conditions in the universe. “A black hole, if you looked at it naked … would be invisible,” said Sheperd Doeleman, director of the...

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