Hello space cats so there we have it the
first direct visual evidence of a
supermassive black hole. This is not
Sagittarius A* the supermassive
black hole at the center of our galaxy
but if you follow me on Twitter, Facebook
or Instagram you'll see that is not far
off from the predictions that we made
this black hole lives at the heart of
m87 a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo
cluster of galaxies 55 million light
years away from the earth. This black
hole is 6.5 billion times the mass of
our Sun. It is a monster in comparison to
the black hole at the center of our
galaxy which is only 4 million times the
mass of our Sun. In fact it's one of the
heaviest black holes that we know of
The primary target of the event horizon
telescope is the supermassive black hole
at the center of our galaxy and whilst
there's many supermassive black holes
that we know of in the universe they're
just too far away for our telescopes to
resolve. That's with the exception of
m87 supermassive black hole. We know that
the size of a black hole is proportional
to its mass and so because m87's black
hole is so heavy we also knew it was
going to be very very large and that's
why it became the second target. When we
zoom into the radio what we're seeing
are rings of gravitationally lends light
from the hot plasma whizzing around the
black hole. The black hole casts its
silhouette on the glowing radiation and
the size of this silhouette corresponds
to the event horizon - the point of no
return but we're not seeing the event
horizon itself, no, we're seeing just
outside of the event horizon a place
that we call the last photon orbit. The
gravitational lensing is so strong that
it doesn't matter which angle we look at
the black hole we still see these rings
of gravitational lensed light.
We've known about em 87's black hole for
a very long time now it's radio-loud
it's an active black hole so we've not
just observed it in radio, in the X-rays
we've seen it with ESA's xmm-newton and
NASA's Chandra mission, in optical we
have Hubble and you can see these giant
optical jets these Jets are so powerful
that they can shape the entire intra
cluster gas within the Virgo cluster of
galaxies of which it lies in
the resolution the smallest size that we
can say is equal to the wavelength
divided by the size of the telescope the
event horizon telescope has a resolution
of 20 micro arc seconds that's like
being able to see an orange placed on
the surface of the moon from Earth. The
m87 black hole has a size of 40
micro arc seconds so even with a
telescope the size of the earth we can
only just about resolve it to do better
we would have to build more telescopes
have a smaller wavelength or make it an
even larger radio dish but that would
mean building radio dishes on places
like the moon
it's difficult to re-piece all the
information from all the different radio
telescopes because the signal arrives at
those radio dishes at all different
times but not only that, this one image
is created from five petabytes of data
that's like five million gigabytes of
data. It is so much data that the
scientists had to store it on hundreds
of hard drives and it was much quicker
to transport this data by person than it
was to download it over the Internet the
scientists are hard at work processing
the image of our galaxy I think they
need some more data but hopefully is
going to come soon what did you think of
the photo did you like it as much as I
did or did you think it was overhyped
and a bit lame let me know in the
comment section below and if you enjoyed
this video make sure you like share and
subscribe
