Wednesday 10 April 2019

event horizon

In a crowning achievement after two years of observations, ploughing through an incredible trove of data, using a globe-spanning network of telescopes, the team of astronomers behind the Event Horizon project (previously) have successfully imaged a composite picture of the radiant halo, the accretion disc of captured matter, around a black hole.
Data processing and transport—too much to transmit, the hard drives were collected and delivered via sneakernet, including from Antarctica, was the biggest time-consumer for this pioneering feat, which also dispels the doubts that Albert Einstein harboured for his own theoretical stellar career-path and tests Relativity bent to the extremes. The mass of six and a half billion suns has been ingested by the supermassive phenomenon at the centre of distant galaxy Messier 87, captured objects flung at nearly the speed of light before disappearing, never to escape. This silhouette of the infinite was actually the understudy, the project initially hoping to capture a snapshot of Sagittarius A* at the centre of the Milky Way, far closer but many magnitudes less massive and too faint to resolve.