How extreme zooming produced the first photo of a black hole

Wednesday 15 July 2020, 16:32 by Nando Harmsen | 4,103 views | 1 comment

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

It was 2019 when scientists presented the first photo of the shadow of a black hole. It was a blurry coloured spot in a black field, with a hole in the middle.

The photo was taken with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which consists of eight radio telescopes spread across planet Earth, forming a telescope as large as the Earth itself. Imagine a lens with a front element 12,742 kilometres in diameter.

The historic photo of the shadow of a black hole. Do you know how much it was zoomed in? (credit: ESO)

This telescope, which does not capture the radiation we call visible light but radio waves, was zoomed in on the core of the galaxy M87, 54 million light-years away (one light-year is the distance light travels in one year, and light travels at a speed of 300,000 km per second).

To give you an idea of how far it was zoomed in, ESO (European Southern Observatory) released a short video. It zooms in from the observatory all the way to the core of the galaxy.

For a more tangible comparison, this is the same as zooming in on an orange lying on the Moon, or zooming in from Rotterdam on a 20 euro cent coin lying on the Statue of Liberty in New York.

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About the author

Nando Harmsen has been photographing for more than 40 years. He specialises in wedding photography and landscape photography. Nando also gives talks, workshops, masterclasses and photo trips, and regularly reviews new and interesting equipment.

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1 comment

paul philippaerts wrote on Tuesday 21 July 2020 at 19:04 | reply
Strange, isn't it, that man as man makes little progress crime deviations learning teenager headstrong stubborn ...and that every individual only wants to believe what they themselves have experienced. And in science man takes giant leaps forward one generation takes over believes what the previous one established and works further on that.
Translated from Dutch.

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