In April 2019, using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), researchers issued the first image of a black hole in galaxy M87. Yet, that exceptional act was just the beginning of the science story to be told.
Data from 19 observatories released today promise to give a rare insight into this black hole and the system it powers, and to update analyses of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
“We knew that the first uninterrupted image of a black hole would be revolutionary,” says Kazuhiro Hada of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, a co-author of the latest research issued in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that explains the broad set of data. “But to get the most out of this extraordinary image, we want to grasp everything we can about the black hole’s response at that time by examining over the entire electromagnetic spectrum.”