We can also tell that it spins clockwise. It does not have any visible surface, and the 'shadow' of light it creates is circular within the limits of our observations. One key finding is that the object is truly a black hole, at least as we've understood black holes using relativity. A monsterĪt a press conference this morning, Avery Broderick of the Perimeter Institute described what the images tell us. The eventual escape of these photons causes a bright ring to appear around the black hole, with the details of the ring reflecting the physics of the object. Here, at the edge of the event horizon, the intense gravity causes space itself to swirl around the black hole, and causes nearby matter to move at approximately the speed of light. The image itself, however, is made from photons that were temporarily trapped in orbit around the black hole.
M87 is an active galaxy where the black hole is feeding on matter and ejecting jets of material.
The black hole in that's the subject of today's announcement is a supermassive one at the center of the galaxy M87, 55 million light years away.
