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. The project is named after the event horizon, the proposed boundary around a black hole that represents the point of no return where no light or radiation can escape. More than 200 researchers were involved in the project, and they had worked for more than a decade to capture the image. “We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole.” “We have seen what we thought was unseeable,” said Sheperd Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, unveiling the historic snap. That image of a black hole you saw everywhere? Thank this grad student for making it possible The supermassive black hole and its shadow, at the center of a galaxy known as M87, were photographed back in April 2017, but the results were only revealed on Wednesday. Powehi was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope, a project that connected eight telescopes around the world. “I hope we are able to continue naming future black holes from Hawaii astronomy according to the Kumulipo.” “To have the privilege of giving a Hawaiian name to the very first scientific confirmation of a black hole is very meaningful to me and my Hawaiian lineage that comes from po,” he added. “It is awesome that we, as Hawaiians today, are able to connect to an identity from long ago, as chanted in the 2,102 lines of the Kumulipo, and bring forward this precious inheritance for our lives today,” Kimura said in a statement. It puts together two terms from the chant: Po, meaning profound dark source of unending creation, and wehi (or wehiwehi) which is one of the several ways that po is described in the chant. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5-billion times that of the Sun. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This breakthrough was announced in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 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. 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.
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