FIRST PHOTO OF A BLACK HOLE....AGAIN??

I recently saw an article indicating that astroscientists finally photographed a black hole.  However, I send you to my posting of a year ago with a title:  The First Photo of a Black Hole.

• The film mentioned above sought to photograph our black hole and another, Messier 87, located 53 million light years away, estimated to be 2.4 billion solar masses.  In other words, the light from that galaxy we see started moving in our direction 53 million years ago.  I'm giving away a big secret, but the team succeeded with this photo in April of 2019, the first and only black hole ever photographed:

• 
  This is what they did to take that shot.  More than 300 scientists from 60 institutions in 20 countries began their quest a dozen years ago.  
• The telescopes were located at those sites on the globe to the right.  I had only three telescopes in PAT (Planetary Abstracting Trinterferometer, proposed to detect the first exoplanet in the mid 1970's).
• What they had to do to keep this a secret so no one else could steal their accomplishment is captured in the film.
• Our black hole has still not been photographed.

So that's the answer, this time the image was of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way, captured by the same Event Horizon Telescope.  Our black hole is 1,000 times less massive than M87.

A black hole sucks-in anything that gets close, but this falling matter casts a shadow that is about 2.5 times larger than a black hole's event horizon.  Above you see this shadow.  Explained here:

Here is the historical story:

Above from left to right are Penrose, Genzel and Ghez.  While all that was ongoing, the black hole photographers went to work:

• In 1974, American astronomers Bruce Balick and Robert Brown pointed the radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia in the direction of Sagittarius A and found a dim speck.  They named it Sagittarius A*.
• 
  New generations of radio telescopes later came online, and combined with more computer power, so in 2007 a trio of telescopes in Hawaii (these two on Mauna Kea to the right), California and New Mexico attempted to together pierce the veil surrounding what they thought should be a black hole.  They saw "something."
• 
  In 2012 the Event Horizon Telescope was founded, in principle.
• Five years later, 200 scientists with eight participating observatories across the globe took its first realistic shot at seeing the shadow of Sagittarius A*.
• Then five years later, 2022, supercomputers developed that photo of our Black Hole.  Here are some further details.  Can't read it and want to?  Click on that link.

Next on the Event Horizon Telescope agenda?  A movie film of M87 at work.  That amorphous shadow has a diameter larger than the outer orbit of our most distant planet in our solar system.  While M87 is 54.5 million light years away, the size in the sky is about the same as the one in our Milky Way, which is only 25,640 light years away. 

Even that distance is difficult to imagine, for if you shone a light towards our Black Hole from Earth, it would take 25,640 years to get there.  Cavemen invented agriculture around 14,500 years ago.

-