Results from the Event Horizon Telescope

Following yesterday’s little teaser, let me point out that there is a press conference taking place today (at 2pm Irish Summer Time, that’s 3pm Brussels) to announce a new result from the Event Horizon Telescope. The announcement will be streamed live here.

Sadly, I’m teaching at the time of the press conference so I won’t be able to watch, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t!

I’ll post pictures and comments when I get back. Watch this space. Or you could watch this video..

UPDATE: Well, there we are. Here is the image of the `shadow’ of the event horizon around the black hole in M87:

The image is about 42 micro arcseconds across. I guess to people brought up on science fiction movies with fancy special effects the image is probably a little underwhelming, but it really is an excellent achievement to get that resolution. Above all, it’s a great example of scientific cooperation – 8 different telescopes all round the world. The sizeable European involvement received a substantial injection of funding from the European Union too!

Other parameters are here:

The accompanying EU press release is here. Further information can be found here. The six publications relating to this result can be found here:

• Paper I: The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole
• Paper II: Array and Instrumentation
• Paper III: Data processing and Calibration
• Paper IV: Imaging the Central Supermassive Black Hole
• Paper V: Physical Origin of the Asymmetric Ring
• Paper VI: The Shadow and Mass of the Central Black Hole

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