An international research team, including visiting researchers at Kogakuin University, has succeeded in photographing a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy.It was observed by linking eight radio telescopes around the world to make it look like one giant telescope, and this is the first time that a black hole has been captured.There are voices praising the achievements of the Nobel Prize class.
According to Kogakuin University, the observed black hole is located in the center of the Messiah 5,500 galaxy in Maiden, about 87 million light-years away from Earth, and weighs about 65 billion times as much as the Sun.The image shows a ring of light with a diameter of about 1,000 billion kilometers around it.
The international research team linked eight radio telescopes in the United States, Mexico, Chile, Spain, and the South Pole to realize a virtual telescope of the size of the earth, and shot at a resolution about 8 times higher than that of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Although the black hole cannot be seen directly, the gas sucked by gravity emits radio waves and X-rays, so we captured this radio wave and analyzed the data to highlight the black shadow of the black hole.In this, Dr. Ki plays a major role in theoretical research for physically interpreting images of black holes.
Black holes were found to exist in past studies based on the movement of stars around them, but they were not imaged.It is conceivable that the success of this shooting will give us new insights in the formation of galaxies and theoretical verification of physics.
* The icon image is an image of the M87 center black hole taken with EHT (Credit: EHT Collaboration).
