![]() ![]() Tracking the stellar speeds and position allowed researchers to build a three-dimensional view of the galaxy.Īstronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, were able to determine the mass of the black hole at the galaxy's core to a high precision, estimating it at 5.4 billion times the mass of the Sun. The stellar motion was used to provide new insights into the shape of the galaxy and its rotation, and it also yielded a new measurement of the black hole's mass. Scientists made the 3D plot by measuring the motions of stars that swarm around the galaxy's supermassive central black hole. Determining the true shape of giant elliptical galaxies will help astronomers understand better how large galaxies and their central large black holes form. For example, the whole class of huge galaxies called "ellipticals" look like blobs in pictures. In most cases, astronomers must use their intuition to figure out the true shapes of deep-space objects. This stereo vision was made possible by combining the power of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the ground-based W. This galaxy turns out to be "triaxial," or potato-shaped. Now for the first time, astronomers have measured the three-dimensional shape of one of the biggest and closest elliptical galaxies to us, M87. Though we live in a vast three-dimensional universe, celestial objects seen through a telescope look flat because everything is so far away. It not only has a long and short axis, which defines an ellipse on a piece of graph paper, but they measured a third axis which helps define the three-dimensionality. By following the motion of stars around the center of M87, like bees around a hive, they've measured that the galaxy looks potato-shaped. They picked one of the nearest elliptical galaxies to Earth, M87, located 55 million light-years away in the heart of the vast Virgo cluster of galaxies. Now, a century later, astronomers at last have the tools to estimate the true shape of an elliptical galaxy. They are too far away for astronomers to employ stereoscopic vision. Though the universe is three-dimensional, galaxies look flat on the sky. Others looked like cotton balls, which he called elliptical galaxies. Many were flattened spiral disks of stars. Like a kid collecting rocks, he sorted them into shapes. ![]() American astronomer Edwin Hubble realized this in the early 20th century when he used the most powerful telescope on Earth at the time to peer across the universe. Though it's estimated that the universe contains 1 trillion galaxies, they come in just a few basic shapes. Four Successful Women Behind the Hubble Space Telescope's Achievements.Characterizing Planets Around Other Stars.Measuring the Universe's Expansion Rate.The EHT is also laying the groundwork for extended observing campaigns to make movies of jet launching in M87. The EHT is pushing toward observing at 345 GHz (0.87 mm), which will enable imaging at even higher angular resolution. In addition to these two sources, the EHT observes a wide range of AGN sources with prominent jets, ranging from radio galaxies to blazars, at a resolution unobtainable with any other instrument. ![]() Sgr A* has no obvious jet and is orders of magnitude smaller than M87 in mass and accretion rate. M87 is a low-luminosity active galactic nucleus (AGN) source that launches a jet that is prominent at radio and optical wavelengths. The two main targets for general relativity, M87 and Sgr A*, are very different in astrophysical character. The EHT also aims to understand the astrophysics of supermassive black hole systems. M87 and Sgr A* are the primary targets in which the photon ring is easily resolvable by the EHT. Confirming that the inner edge of the ring is circular and of the predicted size constitutes a test of general relativity in a strong-field environment. General relativity predicts that a bright photon ring will appear whose size is proportional to the mass of the black hole. The EHT aims to image the region affected by strong gravitational lensing around supermassive black holes. The Sparse Modeling Imaging Library for Interferometry (SMILI) has proven to be better than traditional imaging methods at reconstructing super-resolved images. Haystack is at the forefront in algorithms to turn calibrated data into images. Haystack is in the middle of a development program to modernize HOPS based on lessons learned from years of handling EHT data. Originally designed in the 1990s to handle geodetic VLBI data, HOPS has proven to be well suited to the challenges of reducing millimeter VLBI data. The main EHT data reduction pathway uses the Haystack Observatory Post-processing System (HOPS). Event Horizon Telescope observations were made by observations around the globe data was sent to MIT Haystack Observatory and the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie for correlation Algorithms ![]()
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