Were about to see the first close-up of a black hole.<\/p>\n
The Event Horizon Telescope<\/a>, a network of eight radio observatories spanning the globe, has set its sights on a pair of behemoths: Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the Milky Ways center, and an even more massive black hole 53.5 million light-years away in galaxy M87 (SN Online: 4\/5\/17<\/em>).<\/p>\n In April 2017, the observatories teamed up to observe the black holes event horizons<\/a>, the boundary beyond which gravity is so extreme that even light cant escape (SN: 5\/31\/14, p. 16<\/em>). After almost two years of rendering the data, scientists are gearing up to release the first images in April.<\/p>\n Heres what scientists hope those images can tell us.<\/p>\n Black holes live up to their names: The great gravitational beasts emit no light in any part of the electromagnetic spectrum, so they themselves dont look like much.<\/p>\n But astronomers know the objects are there because of a black holes entourage. As a black holes gravity pulls in gas and dust, matter settles into an orbiting disk, with atoms jostling one another at extreme speeds. All that activity heats the matter white-hot, so it emits X-rays and other high-energy radiation. The most voraciously feeding black holes<\/a> in the universe have disks that outshine all the stars in their galaxies (SN Online: 3\/16\/18<\/em>).<\/p>\nWhat does a black hole really look like?[hhmc]
\n<\/h4>\n\n\n
\n