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
In the Dark 
April 10, 2019 at 3:21 pm
https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205
April 10, 2019 at 3:25 pm
Oops! Duplicata. Interesting…
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