The most-visualized black hole of all, as illustrated in the movie Interstellar, shows a predicted event horizon fairly accurately for a very specific class of rotating black holes. Deep within the gravitational well, time passes at a different rate for observers than it does for us far outside of it. The Event Horizon Telescope is expected to reveal the emissions surrounding a black hole's event horizon, directly, for the first time. INTERSTELLAR / R. HURT / CALTECH

Ethan Siegel
Apr 2, 2019

In science, there's no moment more exciting than when you get to confront a longstanding theoretical prediction with the first observational or experimental results. Earlier this decade, the Large Hadron Collider revealed the existence of the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered fundamental particle in the Standard Model. A few years ago, the LIGO collaboration directly detected gravitational waves, confirming a longstanding prediction of Einstein's General Relativity.

And in just a few days, on April 10, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope will make a much-anticipated announcement where they're expected to release the first-ever image of a black hole's event horizon. At the start of the 2010s, such an observation would have been technologically impossible. Yet not only are we about to see what a black hole actually looks like, but we're about to test some fundamental properties of space, time, and gravity as well.

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1 April 2019

The European Commission, European Research Council, and the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project will hold a press conference to present a groundbreaking result from the EHT.

When: On 10 April 2019 at 15:00 CEST

Where: The press conference will be held at the Berlaymont Building, Rue de la Loi (Wetstraat) 200, B-1049 Brussels, Belgium. The event will be introduced by European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, Carlos Moedas, and will feature presentations by the researchers behind this result.

What: A press conference to present a groundbreaking result from the EHT.

Who: The European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, Carlos Moedas, will deliver remarks. Anton Zensus, Chair of the EHT Collaboration Board will also make remarks and introduce a panel of EHT researchers who will explain the result and answer questions:
        Heino Falcke, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands (Chair of the EHT Science Council)
        Monika Mościbrodzka, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands (EHT Working Group Coordinator)
        Luciano Rezzolla, Goethe Universität, Frankfurt, Germany (EHT Board Member)
        Eduardo Ros, Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie, Bonn, Germany, (EHT Board Secretary)

RSVP: This invitation is addressed to media representatives. To participate in the conference, members of the media must register by completing an online form before April 7 23:59 CEST. Please indicate whether you wish to attend in person or if you will participate online only. On-site journalists will have a question-and-answer session with panellists during the conference. In-person individual interviews immediately after the conference will also be possible.
The conference will be streamed online on the ESO website, by the ERC, and on social media. We will take a few questions from social media using the hashtag #AskEHTeu.

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Five different simulations in general relativity, using a magnetohydrodynamic model of the black hole's accretion disk, and how the radio signal will look as a result. Note the clear signature of the event horizon in all the expected results.GRMHD SIMULATIONS OF VISIBILITY AMPLITUDE VARIABILITY FOR EVENT HORIZON TELESCOPE IMAGES OF SGR A*, L. MEDEIROS ET AL., ARXIV:1601.06799

Oct 3, 2018

Ethan Siegel & Starts With A Bang

What does a black hole actually look like? For generations, scientists argued over whether black holes actually existed or not. Sure, there were mathematical solutions in General Relativity that indicated they were possible, but not every mathematical solution corresponds to our physical reality. It took observational evidence to settle that issue.

Owing to matter orbiting and infalling around black holes, both stellar-mass versions and the supermassive versions, we've detected the X-ray emissions characteristic of their existences. We found and measured the motions of individual stars that orbit suspected black holes, confirming the existence of massive objects at the centers of galaxies. If only we could directly image these objects that emit no light themselves, right? Amazingly, that time is here.

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Artist conception of a tidal disruption event (TDE) that happens when a star passes fatally close to a supermassive black hole, which reacts by launching a relativistic jet. (Sophia Dagnello, NRAO/AUI/NSF; NASA, STScI )

Andrew Griffin  15.06.2018

The huge, violent event sees a blast of matter shot across the universe

Scientists have seen the vast blast thrown out by a black hole eating a star for the first ever time.

Researchers have finally watched the formation and expansion of the fast-moving jet of material that is thrown out when a supermassive black hole's gravity grabs a star and tears it apart.

Scientists watched the dramatic event using highly specialised telescopes, which are trained on a pair of colliding galaxies called Arp 299, nearly 150 million light-years from Earth. At the centre of one of those galaxies, a star twice the size of the Sun came too close to a black hole that is more than 20 million times big as our Sun – and was shredded apart, throwing a blast across the universe.

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A 1998 illustration of a spacecraft using negative energy to warp space-time and travel faster than light (digital art by Les Bossinas (Cortez III Service Corp.), 1998)

Dave Mosher May 24, 2018

• The US Department of Defense funded a series of studies on advanced aerospace technologies, including warp drives.
• The studies came out of a program that also funded research into UFO sightings.
• One report describes the possibility of using dark energy to warp space and effectively travel faster than light.
• However, a theoretical physicist says there's "zero chance that anyone within our lifetimes or the next 1,000 years" will see it happen.

Sometime after August 2008, the US Department of Defense contracted dozens of researchers to look into some very, very out-there aerospace technologies, including never-before-seen methods of propulsion, lift, and stealth.

Two researchers came back with a 34-page report for the propulsion category, titled "Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions."

The document is dated April 2, 2010, though it was only recently released by the Defense Intelligence Agency. (Business Insider first learned about in a post by Paul Szoldra at Task & Purpose.)

The authors suggest we may not be too far away from cracking the mysteries of higher, unseen dimensions and negative or "dark energy," a repulsive force that physicists believe is pushing the universe apart at ever-faster speeds.

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Black holes in these environments could combine repeatedly to form objects bigger than anything a single star could produce.

Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office
April 10, 2018

When LIGO’s twin detectors first picked up faint wobbles in their respective, identical mirrors, the signal didn’t just provide first direct detection of gravitational waves — it also confirmed the existence of stellar binary black holes, which gave rise to the signal in the first place.
Stellar binary black holes are formed when two black holes, created out of the remnants of massive stars, begin to orbit each other. Eventually, the black holes merge in a spectacular collision that, according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, should release a huge amount of energy in the form of gravitational waves.

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The center of the Milky Way galaxy, with the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), located in the middle.
PHOTOGRAPH BY NASA/UMASS/D.WANG ET AL., STSCI

By Sarah Gibbens
PUBLISHED APRIL 4, 2018

A gaggle of black holes has been found clustered around the center of our home galaxy, the Milky Way—and the discovery hints at a much larger population of black holes hidden across the galaxy. The discover offers a new test bed for understanding the ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves.

For years, scientists have known that a monster black hole sits in the middle of the galaxy. Called Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the compact object is more than four million times as massive as our sun, but it's packed into a region of space no bigger than the distance between Earth and our star.

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March 22, 2018

Sabine Hossenfelder

We all dream the same dream, here in theoretical physics. We dream of the day when one of our equations will be plotted against data and fit spot on. It’s rare for this dream to come true. Even if it does, some don’t live to see it.

Take, for example, Albert Einstein, who passed away in 1955, 60 years before his equations’ most stunning consequence was confirmed: Space-time has periodic ripples — gravitational waves — that can carry energy across billions of light-years.

Since that September 2015 black hole collision, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) team has reported five more events (a sixth fell just short of the standard of significance). But the LIGO data is still virgin territory. It is an entirely new way of decoding the universe, and physicists must develop methods of data analysis along with the measurements.

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The black hole, as illustrated in the movie Interstellar, shows an event horizon fairly accurately for a very specific class of rotating black holes. Image credit: Interstellar / R. Hurt / Caltech.

The Event Horizon Telescope has come online and taken its data. Now, we wait for the results.

Black holes are some of the most incredible objects in the Universe. There are places where so much mass has gathered in such a tiny volume that the individual matter particles cannot remain as they normally are, and instead collapse down to a singularity. Surrounding this singularity is a sphere-like region known as the event horizon, from inside which nothing can escape, even if it moves at the Universe’s maximum speed: the speed of light. While we know three separate ways to form black holes, and have discovered evidence for thousands of them, we’ve never imaged one directly. Despite all that we’ve discovered, we’ve never seen a black hole’s event horizon, or even confirmed that they truly had one. Next year, that’s all about to change, as the first results from the Event Horizon Telescope will be revealed, answering one of the longest-standing questions in astrophysics.

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The two compact radio sources separated by less than a light year at the center of the galaxyNGC7674. The two sources correspond to the location of the two active supermassive blackholes which form a binary and orbit around each other. Credit: TIFR-NCRA and RIT, USA

September 18, 2017 by Susan Gawlowicz

A study using multiple radio telescopes confirms that supermassive black holes found in the centers of galaxies can form gravitationally bound pairs when galaxies merge.

The paper published in the Sept. 18 issue of Nature Astronomy sheds light on a class of black holes having a mass upwards of one million times the mass of the sun. Supermassive black holes are expected to form tightly bound pairs following the merger of two galaxies.
"The dual black hole we found has the smallest separation of any so far detected through direct imaging," said David Merritt, professor of physics at Rochester Institute of Technology, a co-author on the paper.

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Using a massive telescope network, scientists have data in hand that could open new frontiers in our understanding of gravity.

Westford, MassachusettsFor the monster at the Milky Way’s heart, it’s a wrap.

After completing five nights of observations, today astronomers may finally have captured the first-ever image of the famous gravitational sinkhole known as a black hole.

More precisely, the hoped-for portrait is of a mysterious region that surrounds the black hole. Called the event horizon, this is the boundary beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape the object’s gargantuan grasp.

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HEART OF THE MATTER An illustration of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
PHOTOGRAPH BY NRAO, AUI, NSF

By Ron Cowen
PUBLISHED APRIL 11, 2017
WESTFORD, MASSACHUSETTS For the monster at the Milky Way’s heart, it’s a wrap.

After completing five nights of observations, today astronomers may finally have captured the first-ever image of the famous gravitational sinkhole known as a black hole.

More precisely, the hoped-for portrait is of a mysterious region that surrounds the black hole. Called the event horizon, this is the boundary beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape the object’s gargantuan grasp.

As the final observing run ended at 11:22 a.m. ET, team member Vincent Fish sat contentedly in his office at the MIT Haystack Observatory in Westford, Massachusetts. For the past week, Fish had been on call 24/7, sleeping fitfully with his cell phone next to him, the ringer set loud.

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Now we wait to see it.

FIONA MACDONALD 12 APR 2017

Scientists around the world have spent five sleepless nights staring into the abyss, and are hoping they've been rewarded with something that could change physics forever - the first photo of the event horizon at the edge of a black hole.

If their efforts were successful, we might be on the verge of actually seeing the edge of an elusive black hole, allowing us to see if the fundamentals of general relativity hold fast under some pretty extreme conditions. If Einstein was alive, we're sure he'd be excitedly freaking out right now.

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Commonly held belief and scientific proof holds true that black holes suck matter in rather than spewing them out. But NASA has just found some curious evidence around a supermassive black hole named Markarian 335.

Two of NASA’s telescopes, including the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), observed what is believed to be a black hole’s corona launching away from the supermassive black hole. That event was then followed by a large pulse of X-Ray energy.

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The EHT team has produced simulations of what Einstein's theories predict the hole should look like

Scientists believe they are on the verge of obtaining the first ever picture of a black hole.

By Jonathan Amos
BBC Science Correspondent, Boston

They have built an Earth-sized "virtual telescope" by linking a large array of radio receivers - from the South Pole, to Hawaii, to the Americas and Europe.

There is optimism that observations to be conducted during 5-14 April could finally deliver the long-sought prize.
In the sights of the so-called "Event Horizon Telescope" will be the monster black hole at the centre of our galaxy.
Although never seen directly, this object, catalogued as Sagittarius A*, has been determined to exist from the way it influences the orbits of nearby stars.

These race around a point in space at many thousands of km per second, suggesting the hole likely has a mass of about four million times that of the Sun.

But as colossal as that sounds, the "edge" of the black hole - the horizon inside which an immense gravity field traps all light - may be no more than 20 million km or so across.

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