Scientists first showed the real "photo" of the black hole

Ask any person on the street what a black hole looks like, and he will tell you about it. Of course, everyone remembers the colorful simulations of these space objects from various science fiction films. Therefore, it is hard to believe that so far no one has really seen how black holes look in reality!

April 10, scientists have shown the first real image of the black hole. Here it is worth making a reservation that in fact the resulting image is an image of an accretionary disk , a phenomenon occurring in the immediate vicinity of the still visible boundaries of matter, attracted by a black hole, at the event horizon . And the resulting image surprisingly reminds us of the painfully familiar footage from the Interstellar movie!
')
A press conference on this event is now broadcast live:

The European Commission presented a breakthrough scientific discovery made with the help of Event Horizon Telescope (“Event Horizon Telescope”) - an international scientific cooperation project, which aimed to obtain the first image of a black hole by creating a virtual telescope the size of Earth. EU funded researchers played a key role in the project.

Six press conferences around the world will be held simultaneously. In Europe, leading scientists funded by the European Research Council held a press conference in Brussels to publicize this discovery.

A black hole is an area of ​​space with gravity of such strength that it holds even objects moving with light speed , even the photons themselves, therefore radiation cannot leave the limits of the black hole event horizon. Albert Einstein proved the probability of the existence of such areas by developing the equations of the general theory of relativity at the beginning of the 20th century, but he himself did not believe in the possible reality of such objects.

It was difficult to see a black hole that does not let out light (more precisely, as has already been said, you can only see its inner circle), and a hole located in such a great distance is even more difficult! To solve this problem, scientists combined nine radio telescopes from different parts of the Earth into one large “virtual telescope”. List of telescopes involved in the Event Horizon Telescope project. Radio telescopes belong to Spain, Chile (2), Mexico, USA (4), Denmark. In 2020, another telescope from the USA and one from France will be connected to the project.

The project "Telescope of the Event Horizon" aimed at observing supermassive black holes forming the nuclei of most galaxies. Scientists watched two black holes for ten days in April 2017, one of which is the black hole Sagittarius A * in the center of the Milky Way, at a distance of about 26 thousand light years from Earth. As a result of the observations , more than 500 terabytes of data of at least 350 terabytes of data from each of the cluster telescopes were recorded , and the processing of this vast array of information took two years.