A supermassive black hole that resides 55 million light-years from Earth — and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the sun…
A supermassive black hole that resides 55 million light-years from Earth — and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the sun — was photographed for the first time by a team of hundreds of scientists who announced the historic feat Wednesday morning.
During the announcement from Washington, D. C., astronomers from Brussels to Santiago to Shanghai celebrated their success in live-streamed news conference.
But Ken Young, one of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics scientists credited with capturing the image — which helps confirm Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity — watched from his home in downtown Des Moines.
He first saw the image months ago, he said, as did the rest of the team, which also wrote several scientific papers on the topic.
„It was better than I thought it would be,“ Young, 61, told the Register of seeing the image for the first time. „I thought there would be a round or two of images where you could convince yourself (a black hole) was there. I think everyone was very pleasantly surprised the shadow of the black hole showed so clearly.
