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Mouth of Giant Black Hole Measured for First Time
For the first time, scientists have peered to the edge of a colossal black hole and measured the point of no return for matter.
Image: This image from a simulation shows an energy jet launched from a spinning black hole surrounded by a disk of accreting material. The black hole is spinning at half the maximum rate, and its mass is that of the black hole at the center of the M87 elliptical galaxy. The central black hole ‘shadow’ due to extreme light bending is apparent in this simulation. Credit: Avery E. Broderick (University of Waterloo/Perimeter
A black hole has a boundary called an event horizon. Anything that falls within a black hole’s event horizon — be it stars, gas, or even light — can never escape.
“Once objects fall through the event horizon, they’re lost forever,” Shep Doeleman, assistant director of the MIT Haystack Observatory and research associate at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, said in a statement Thursday (Sept. 27). “It’s an exit door from our universe. You walk through that door, you’re not coming back.”
Although the event horizon is an imaginary line that’s impossible to observe, astronomers have imaged the region around a giant black hole at the center of a distant galaxy, and measured, for the first time, the closest stable orbit in which matter can circle the black hole. The findings were reported today in the journal Science.
The supermassive black hole in question lies at the center of the galaxy M87, which is about 50 million light-years from our own Milky Way. This behemoth black hole contains the mass of 6 billion suns.
Image: This views show the simulated event horizon-resolving images for the ultra-relativistic jet launched from the 7 billion solar-mass black hole at the center of the giant elliptical galaxy M87. Credit: Avery E. Broderick (University of Waterloo/Perimeter Institute)
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