The ngEHT award is aimed at solving the formidable technical and algorithmic challenges required to significantly expand the capability of the EHT. Sparked by this major investment, the ngEHT is expected to attract additional international support and participation by the broad EHT community. The ngEHT will give us front-row seats to one of the Universe's most spectacular shows." "Imagine being able to see a black hole evolve before your eyes. "As with all great discoveries, the first black hole image was just the beginning," says Doeleman, Founding Director of the EHT. The next-generation EHT (ngEHT) will sharpen the focus on black holes, and let researchers move from still-imagery to real-time videos of space-time at the event horizon. More precise tests of gravity can now be contemplated, and the processes by which supermassive black holes energize the brightness and dynamics of most galaxy cores can be studied in detail. For this work, the EHT Collaboration will receive the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics this November.īlack holes, objects with gravity so strong that light cannot escape, are now accessible to direct imaging. Einstein’s theory of gravity passed this new test in spectacular fashion in this extreme cosmic laboratory. A bright ring of emission at the heart of the Virgo A galaxy revealed a black hole, known as M87, that has the mass of 6.5 billion Suns. On April 10th, 2019, the International Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration released the first image of a supermassive black hole. Michael Johnson, Jonathan Weintroub and Lindy Blackburn are co-Principal Investigators of the ngEHT program. (Katie) Bouman and Gregg Hallinan at Caltech. Vincent Fish at the MIT Haystack Observatory, and Drs. Gopal Narayanan at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Dr. Led by Principal Investigator Shep Doeleman at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian (CfA), the new ngEHT award will fund design and prototyping efforts by researchers at several US institutes. Wide-field image is 11 arcmin (about 190,000 light years) across.The National Science Foundation has just announced the award of a $12.7M grant to architect and design a next-generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT) to carry out a program of transformative black hole science. NeilsenĬlose-up inset image is 1.75 arcmin (about 25,000 light years) across. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, controls Chandra's science and flight operations. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Event Horizon Telescope is an international collaboration whose support includes the National Science Foundation. Read the full story on the M87 observations and the EHT results in our Chandra blog: Chandra's studies of this hot gas have given astronomers insight into the behavior and properties of the giant black hole. Surrounding the elliptical galaxy is a reservoir of multimillion-degree gas, which glows brightly in X-ray light. For years, scientists have known that a supermassive black hole weighing several billion times the mass of the Sun sits at the center of M87. M87 is an elliptical galaxy in the Virgo galaxy cluster, about 60 million light years away from Earth. Future questions the Chandra data may help explore include: How do black holes accelerate some particles to the very high energies that scientists have seen? How does the black hole produce the spectacular jets that Chandra and Hubble have studied for many years? Can data from Chandra and NASA's NuSTAR observatory help play a role in determining more about the physics in this environment? Neilsen, Villanova undergraduate student Jadyn Anczarski, and their collaborators used Chandra and NuSTAR to measure the X-ray brightness of the jet, a data point that EHT scientists used to evaluate their models of the jet. Joey Neilsen of Villanova University and his collaborators put in a request for Director's Discretionary Time to observe M87 simultaneously with the EHT, and received nearly 30,000 seconds of observing time during April 2017. On behalf of the EHT's Multiwavelength Working Group, Dr. This jet, seen in detail from Chandra in the inset, extends more than 1,000 light years from the center of the galaxy. Neilsen Radio: Event Horizon Telescope CollaborationĬhandra has a much larger field of view than the EHT, so it can view the full length of the jet of high-energy particles launched by the intense gravitational and magnetic fields around the black hole at M87. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Villanova University/J.
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