Reporters gathered in rooms all over the world. Everybody wanted to know if it was true. Had scientists really seen the unseeable? Soon they had their answer. Scientists at the Event Horizon Telescope Project had taken a picture of a black hole in outer space.
A black hole is a dense part of space. The gravity inside a black hole is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape its pull. where the gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape its pull. If light cannot escape its pull, how can anything take a picture of it? The Event Horizon Telescope Project solved that problem by capturing an image of the glowing material falling into the black hole.
The project had a bigger problem to solve. That problem was distance. A black hole is far away. Scientists say that the black hole is so far away that seeing it is like trying to see an orange on the surface of moon. They would need a telescope the size of the Earth to see that!
Instead, the Event Horizon Telescope Project used eight different telescopes from around the world. Over two hundred scientists worked together for over two years to transform the data [information] from the telescopes into an image of a black hole. Now, the world finally has an image of one of the most mysterious objects in the universe!
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Photo Credit: EHT Collaboration
