Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com
An international team of astronomers was able to measure the radius of a black hole for the first time.
Researchers measured the radius of a black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, which lies about 50 million light-years away from the Milky Way.
M87 has a black hole 6 billion times more massive than the Sun, and the team was able to observe the glow of matter near the edge of the black hole, or the “event horizon,” using radio dishes in Hawaii, Arizona and California.
These radio dishes created a telescope array known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) that can depict details 2,000 times finer than what is visible to the Hubble Space Telescope.
Shep Doeleman, assistant director at the MIT Haystack Observatory and research associate at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, said the event horizon is like an exit door from our universe, which once you walk through, “you’re not coming back.”
At the edge of a black hole, the gravitational force is so strong that it pulls in everything from its surroundings. However, not everything is able to cross the event horizon to squeeze into the black hole, which results in gas and dust build up. This creates a flat pancake of matter known as an accretion disk.
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