April's Stellar Space Pictures

30.04.2019 22:37

Inside Science

April's Stellar Space Pictures

This month: Black holes and stellar revolutions.

1_crop_black_hole_xray.jpg

A wide-field view of the first ever black hole to be imaged.

Image credits:

NASA/CXC/Villanova University/J. Neilsen

Space

Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 16:30

Abigail Malate, Staff Illustrator

(Inside Science) -- This month, astronomers discovered firsts in many categories. The most notable was the first ever picture of a black hole event horizon. Others include the first type of molecule ever formed, and the first sighting of a scene straight out of science fiction found more than 3,000 light-years away.

Slideshow

This month, astronomers released the first ever image of something previously thought unimageable -- a black hole event horizon. A network of radio antennae around the globe, known as the Event Horizon Telescope, came together to generate the picture from tons of observational data. Above is a wide-field view that NASA's X-ray observatory Chandra captured in coordination with the Event Horizon Telescope. It shows where the black hole is located at the center of a galaxy 60 million light-years from Earth known as Messier 87. (NASA/CXC/Villanova University/J. Neilsen)