From ABC7: Fermilab scientist Brad Benson talks about the South Pole Telescope’s role part in the Event Horizon Telescope. Scientists behind the Event Horizon Telescope recently revealed the first image ever made of a black hole, depicting its hot, shadowy edges where light bends around itself in a cosmic funhouse effect. Assembling data gathered by eight radio telescopes around the world, astronomers created the picture showing the violent neighborhood around a supermassive black hole, the light-sucking monsters of the universe theorized by Einstein more than a century ago and confirmed by observations for decades.
black hole
From WBEZ’s Morning Shift, April 10, 2019: WBEZ interviews Fermilab scientist Brad Benson about the recent unveiling of the first ever photograph of a black hole. The Event Horizon Telescope, a collaboration between more than 200 scientists using telescopes from around the world, shot photographs of a supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87.
From CNN, April 10, 2019: Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln explains the big news from the Event Horizon Telescope on its first direct observation of a black hole at the center of a galaxy named M87. M87 is a supergiant elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo.
The Event Horizon Telescope—a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration—was designed to capture images of a black hole. On April 10, in coordinated news conferences across the globe, researchers revealed that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.
From CNN, April 6, 2019: Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln explains a result from the GRAVITY collaboration, which put Einstein’s theory of relativity to the test, making measurements of light near a black hole.
Let yourself be pulled into the weird world of black holes.
Deep in the dense core of a black hole, protons and electrons are squeezed together to form neutrons, sending ghostly particles called neutrinos streaming out. Matter falls inward. In the textbook case, matter rebounds and erupts, leaving a neutron star. But sometimes, the supernova fails, and there’s no explosion; instead, a black hole is born. Scientists hope to use neutrino experiments to watch a black hole form.
Scientists of the Pierre Auger Collaboration announced today (Nov. 8) that active galactic nuclei are the most likely candidate for the source of the highest-energy cosmic rays that hit Earth.