![]() Knit together "like fragments of a giant mirror," in Bremer's words, they formed a virtual observatory some 12,000 kilometres across - roughly the diameter of Earth. Over several days in April 2017, eight radio telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona, Spain, Mexico, Chile, and the South Pole zeroed in on Sag A* and M87. "Instead of constructing a giant telescope that would collapse under its own weight, we combined many observatories," Michael Bremer, an astronomer at the Institute for Millimetric Radio Astronomy (IRAM) in Grenoble, told AFP. Locking down an image of M87's supermassive black hole at such distance is comparable to photographing a pebble on the Moon.Įuropean Space Agency astrophysicist Paul McNamara called it an "outstanding technical achievement". Most speculation had centred on the other candidate targeted by the Event Horizon Telescope - Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.īy comparison, Sag A* is only 26,000 lightyears from Earth. ![]() "It's a distance that we could have barely imagined," Frederic Gueth, an astronomer at France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and co-author of studies detailing the findings, told AFP. The supermassive black hole now immortalised by a far-flung network of radio telescopes is 50 million lightyears away in a galaxy known as M87. Scientists have been puzzling over invisible "dark stars" since the 18th century, but never has one been spied by a telescope, much less photographed.
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