![]() That’s why, even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. It’s important that we have several ways we make money, just like it’s important for you to have a diversified retirement portfolio to weather the ups and downs of the stock market. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world - not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on.įirst, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism? It took extremely precise atomic clocks at each of the observatory sites to ensure all the data would line up and the resulting image would be clear. The Earth rotates, meaning the individual observatories making up the Event Horizon Telescope are moving too, introducing a type of blur into the data. And the dataset in Antarctica was inaccessible for months due to harsh winter conditions.Īnother reason is that the scientists need to account for the rotation of the Earth. ![]() The hard drives had to be flown from the observatories to get processed. Part of the reason why this announcement has been two years in the making is because the data files were too big to be transferred by digital means. National Science Foundationīut the task of this synchronization is really hard. “When the EHT sites are synchronized, their recordings can later be perfectly aligned in the same way that the mirror aligns the optical light,” the National Science Foundation explains in a video. The Event Horizon Telescope does a similar thing. In it, the curved surface of a mirror reflects light back to a central point, where an image is brought into focus. As the National Science Foundation explains, these eight telescopes were turned into a virtual giant parabolic dish. And in the middle of the bright ring, they hoped to see the silhouette of the black hole itself.Įach telescope ultimately captured an enormous amount of data that needed to be combined to reveal the image of the center of the galaxy. They were looking out for the narrow band of radiation that’s expected to be emitted from the bright ring of material around the black hole. ![]() In April 2017, eight radio telescopes located in Antarctica, Greenland, South America, North America, Hawaii, and Europe all pointed their dishes to the black hole in the center of our galaxy. To take a picture of something that small, you need a huge telescope, one the size of the Earth. Compared to the full moon, the shadow cast by Sagittarius A* is 37.2 million times smaller. Again: The shadow cast by Sagittarius A* is tiny. And there are 1 million microarcseconds in an arcsecond. In science speak, the shadow cast by Sagittarius A* is expected to be around 50 microarcseconds wide when viewed from the Earth. Taking a picture of the shadow cast by Sagittarius A*’s event horizon is like “taking a picture of a DVD on the surface of the moon” from the surface of the Earth, Dimitrios Psaltis, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona and one of the lead scientists on the effort, once told me. There’s a reason why we’ve never seen a picture of the black hole at the center of our galaxy: despite its huge mass, Sagittarius A* is actually very small and is surrounded by bright gas and swirling material. You can watch them reveal the possible image of this black hole and the center of the galaxy right here in this live stream: We’ve never directly seen a black hole or its event horizon.Īt 9 am Eastern on Wednesday, April 10, an international collaboration of scientists called the Event Horizon Telescope is releasing the results of an attempt to photograph Sagittarius A*. Surrounding the black hole is what’s called the “event horizon,” which is the boundary beyond which nothing can escape the black hole’s gravity, not even light. All that mass is compressed into a single point, a singularity, whose gravity is so strong, stars orbit around it. They call it Sagittarius A* (said aloud: Sagittarius A “star”), and it has a mass some 4 million times greater than our sun. In the center of our galaxy, astronomers say there is a monster black hole. Images of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which is discussed below, have not yet been released. The post that follows was first published Tuesday. UPDATE: A photo of the black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy was released by the Event Horizon Telescope Wednesday.
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