Daily News Roundup, 4/11/19: The Black Hole

Amazon employees may be listening to things you say to (and around!) Alexa, YouTube TV got a price hike, Instagram cleans up “inappropriate” recommendations, and a lot more. Here are the biggest stories for the morning of April 11, 2019.

Our First Glimpse of a Black Hole Thanks to a Marriage of Science and Technology

This type of story is normally outside of the things we talk about here at HTG, but it’s a really big deal, and it’s really cool. It’s worth talking about!

Yesterday, the first image of a black hole was released. Scientists from the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration shared the image. The fact that we’re getting real-life human eyeballs on one of the most powerful forces known to man is humbling, fascinating, and just downright cool.

The caption for the image on the Event Horizon Telescope homepage is enough to boggle the mind on its own:

The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun. This long-sought image provides the strongest evidence to date for the existence of supermassive black holes and opens a new window onto the study of black holes, their event horizons, and gravity.

Six point five billion times more massive than the sun. That’s bigger than our entire solar system. That is so profoundly huge it’s nearly impossible to comprehend. The image was captured using eight strategically-placed telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona, Chile, Mexico, Spain, and the South Pole. According to CNET, the concept is to “combine the signal strength of the observatories on different corners of the globe to form an array as wide as Earth itself.” So, a telescope that’s effectively as big as the world.

To put into perspective how difficult it is to capture an image of this magnitude, the Director of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration Shep Doeleman likened it to “being able to read the date on a quarter in Los Angeles, standing here in Washingon D.C.” It’s hard to imagine how that’s even possible in the first place.