A mural of George Floyd is shown in the intersection of 38th St & Chicago Ave on March 31, 2021 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Community members continue preparations during the third day in the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who is charged with multiple counts of murder in the death of George Floyd. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images) WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 01: President Donald Trump's lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani talks to journalists outside the White House West Wing July 01, 2020 in Washington, DC. Giuliani did an on-camera interview with One America News Network's Chanel Rion before talking to other journalists about Vice President Joe Biden and the news that Russian intelligence may have paid Taliban operatives to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) ORLANDO, FLORIDA - FEBRUARY 28: Former President Donald Trump addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference held in the Hyatt Regency on February 28, 2021 in Orlando, Florida. Begun in 1974, CPAC brings together conservative organizations, activists, and world leaders to discuss issues important to them. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) NEW YORK, NY - FEBRUARY 09: People walk past the Trump Tower as the impeachment trial of Donald Trump begins in Washington on February 09, 2021 in New York City. After listening to nearly four hours of legal arguments, the Senate has voted on Tuesday to move ahead with the impeachment trial of former President Trump. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 20: U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the conflict in the Middle East from Cross- Hall of the White House on May 20, 2021 in Washington, DC. Israel and Hamas announced that they would agree to a cease-fire, which will take into effect on Friday, following days of fighting that claimed more than 200 lives. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images) SAN JOSE, CA - MAY 26: A view of the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) light-rail yard where a mass shooting occurred on May 26, 2021 in San Jose, California. A VTA employee opened fire at the yard, with preliminary reports indicating nine people dead including the gunman. (Photo by Philip Pacheco/Getty Images) A healthcare worker prepares to administer a Pfizer/BioNTEch coronavirus disease (Covid-19) vaccine at The Michener Institute, in Toronto, Ontario on December 14, 2020. - Ontario, Canada's most populous province and one of the hardest hit by the pandemic, had 1,940 new cases and 23 deaths on Monday. The province is expected to give its next doses to nursing home workers as a priority, according to media reports. (Photo by CARLOS OSORIO / POOL / AFP) (Photo by CARLOS OSORIO/POOL/AFP via Getty Images) Memorial Day weekend will bring rain and cool air for much of the East The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) -- a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration -- was designed to capture images of a black hole. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow. This breakthrough was announced in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5-billion times that of the Sun. (CNN) — In April 2017, scientists used a global network of telescopes to see and capture the first-ever picture of a black hole, according to an announcement by researchers at the National Science Foundation Wednesday morning. They captured an image of the supermassive black hole and its shadow at the center of a galaxy known as M87. This is the first direct visual evidence that black holes exist, the researchers said. In the image, a central dark region is encapsulated by a ring of light that looks brighter on one side. The massive galaxy, called Messier 87 or M87, is near the Virgo galaxy cluster 55 million light-years from Earth. The supermassive black hole has a mass that is 6.5 billion times that of our sun. “We have seen what we thought was unseeable,” said Sheperd Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. “We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole.” National Science Foundation The black hole image captured by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, called EHT, is a global network of telescopes that captured the first-ever photograph of a black hole. More than 200 researchers were involved in the project. They have worked for more than a decade to capture this. The project is named for the event horizon, the proposed boundary around a black hole that represents the point of no return where no light or radiation can escape. In their attempt to capture an image of a black hole, scientists combined the power of eight radio telescopes around the world using Very-Long-Baseline-Interferometry, according to the European Southern Observatory, which is part of the EHT. This effectively creates a virtual telescope around the same size as the Earth itself. The telescopes involved in creating the global array included ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-meter telescope, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano, the Submillimeter Array, the Submillimeter Telescope and the South Pole Telescope. “The observations were a coordinated dance in which we simultaneously pointed our telescopes in a carefully planned sequence,” said Daniel Marrone, associate professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona. “To make sure these observations were truly simultaneous, so that we could see the same wavefront of light as it landed on each telescope, we used extremely precise atomic clocks at each of the telescopes.” The telescope array collected 5,000 trillion bytes of data over two weeks, which was processed through supercomputers so that the scientists could retrieve the images. Details of the observation were published in a series of six research papers published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. What are black holes? Black holes are made up of huge amounts of matter squeezed into a small area, according to NASA, creating a massive gravitational field which draws in everything around it, including light. They also have a way of super-heating the material around them and warping spacetime. Material accumulates around black holes, is heated to billions of degrees and reaches nearly the speed of light. Light bends around the gravity of the black hole, which creates the photon ring seen in the image. The imaging methods used to capture the photo reveal that the supermassive black hole has a ring-like structure and a shadow, which is represented by a dark central region. “If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowing gas, we expect a black hole to create a dark region similar to a shadow – something predicted by Einstein’s general relativity that we’ve never seen before,” said Heino Falcke, chair of the EHT Science Council. “This shadow, caused by the gravitational bending and capture of light by the event horizon, reveals a lot about the nature of these fascinating objects and allowed us to measure the enormous mass of M87’s black hole.” The visual confirmation of black holes acts as confirmation of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. In the theory, Einstein predicted that dense, compact regions of space would have such intense gravity that nothing could escape them. But if heated materials in the form of plasma surround the black hole and emit light, the event horizon could be visible. “Once we were sure we had imaged the shadow, we could compare our observations to extensive computer models that include the physics of warped space, superheated matter and strong magnetic fields. Many of the features of the observed image match our theoretical understanding surprisingly well,” said Paul T.P. Ho, EHT Board member and director of the East Asian Observatory. “This makes us confident about the interpretation of our observations, including our estimation of the black hole’s mass.” M87’s black hole has an enormous mass, which gave researchers reason to believe it may be the largest viewable black hole from Earth. Relative to other objects, supermassive black holes are actually small. This is why they couldn’t be observed before. Black hole size is directly related to mass. The larger the black hole, the larger the shadow. And black holes may seem invisible, but the way they interact with the material around them is the giveaway, the researchers said. “Black holes have sparked imaginations for decades,” said National Science Foundation director France Córdova. “They have exotic properties and are mysterious to us. Yet with more observations like this one they are yielding their secrets. This is why NSF exists. We enable scientists and engineers to illuminate the unknown, to reveal the subtle and complex majesty of our universe.” Jack Guy contributed to this report.<doc-sep>Katie Bouman reacted modestly to her sudden celebrity status this week, but the scientist whose graduate school work helped lead to the first image of a black hole Wednesday, is getting her due. Bouman, who is an assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences at Cal Tech, created an algorithm during grad school at MIT that made the image possible. FOSSILIZED REMAINS OF 430 MILLION-YEAR-OLD 'SEA MONSTER' FOUND The 29-year-old worked with MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the MIT Haystack Observatory and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics for the last several years, leading to the development of the algorithm. The image of the black hole was captured from 55 million lights years away (one light year is equal to six trillion miles) in galaxy Messier 87. The discovery was made by Event Horizon Telescope, an international project that describes itself as a “virtual Earth-sized telescope.” Black holes have a mass 6.5 billion times that of the sun and "drastically warp the fabric of space-time," the National Science Foundation says on its website. “3 years ago MIT grad student Katie Bouman led the creation of a new algorithm to produce the first-ever image of a black hole,” MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab tweeted Wednesday. “Today, that image was released.” CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP In another tweet, the lab added, "Scientist Katie Bouman just posted about the moment when 'the first image I ever made of a black hole' was processed. Just to clarify, this was the first image *ANYONE EVER MADE* of a black hole." TO KEEP READING IN THE NEW YORK POST, CLICK HERE.<doc-sep>
Katie Bouman: The woman behind the first black hole image Published 11 April 2019 media caption Katie Bouman designed an algorithm that made the image possible A 29-year-old computer scientist has earned plaudits worldwide for helping develop the algorithm that created the first-ever image of a black hole. Katie Bouman led development of a computer program that made the breakthrough image possible. The remarkable photo, showing a halo of dust and gas 500 million trillion km from Earth, was released on Wednesday. For Dr Bouman, its creation was the realisation of an endeavour previously thought impossible. Excitedly bracing herself for the groundbreaking moment, Dr Bouman was pictured loading the image on her laptop. "Watching in disbelief as the first image I ever made of a black hole was in the process of being reconstructed," she wrote in the caption to the Facebook post. She started making the algorithm three years ago while she was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There, she led the project, assisted by a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the MIT Haystack Observatory. Watching in disbelief as the first image I ever made of a black hole was in the process of being reconstructed. Posted by Katie Bouman on Wednesday, April 10, 2019 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. View original post on Facebook The black hole image, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) - a network of eight linked telescopes - was rendered by Dr Bouman's algorithm. "When we saw it for the first time, we were all in disbelief. It was quite spectacular," she told BBC Radio 5 live. "We got really lucky with the weather... We got lucky in so many ways." In the hours after the photo's momentous release, Dr Bouman became an international sensation, with her name trending on Twitter. Dr Bouman was also hailed by MIT and the Smithsonian on social media. "3 years ago MIT grad student Katie Bouman led the creation of a new algorithm to produce the first-ever image of a black hole," MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab wrote. "Today, that image was released." But Dr Bouman, now an assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences at the California Institute of Technology, insisted the team that helped her deserves equal credit. The effort to capture the image, using telescopes in locations ranging from Antarctica to Chile, involved a team of more than 200 scientists. "No one of us could've done it alone," she told CNN. "It came together because of lots of different people from many different backgrounds." What do we know about the black hole? The black hole, which is "unseeable" to the naked eye, measures 40 billion km across, or three million times the size of the Earth It was scanned over a period of 10 days in the Messier 87 galaxy It is "larger than the size of our entire Solar System", Prof Heino Falcke, of Radboud University in the Netherlands, who proposed the experiment, told the BBC How did her algorithm create the image? Put simply, Dr Bouman and others developed a series of algorithms that converted telescopic data into the historic photo shared by the world's media. In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is a process or set of rules used to solve problems. image copyright Reuters image caption The first ever photo of a black hole, taken using a global network of telescopes No single telescope is powerful enough to capture the black hole, so a network of eight was set up to so do using a technique called interferometry. The data they captured was stored on hundreds of hard drives that were flown to central processing centres in Boston, US, and Bonn, Germany. Dr Bouman's method of processing this raw data was said to be instrumental in the creation of the striking image. She spearheaded a testing process whereby multiple algorithms with "different assumptions built into them" attempted to recover a photo from the data. image caption The eventual EHT array will have 12 widely spaced participating radio facilities The results of the algorithms were then analysed by four separate teams to build confidence in the veracity of their findings. "We're a melting pot of astronomers, physicists, mathematicians and engineers, and that's what it took to achieve something once thought impossible," Dr Bouman says. Figure caption Warning: Third party content may contain adverts