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See How The First Ever Image of a Black Hole Was Obtained

On Wednesday, April 10th 2019,  the world was treated to something unprecedented - the first-ever image of a black hole! Specifically, the image captured the Supermassive Black Hole (SMBH) at the center of M87 (aka. Virgo A), a supergiant elliptical galaxy in the Virgo constellation.

Already, this image is being compared to pictures like the "pale blue dot" taken by the Voyager 1 mission or the "Earthrise" image taken by Apollo 8. Like these images, the picture of the M87 black hole has captured the imagination of people all around the world.
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration produced the first-ever image of a black hole, which lies at the center of the M87 galaxy 55 million light-years from Earth. The image showed a bright ring with a dark center, which is the black hole's shadow. In capturing this image, astronomers noticed a significant amount of polarized light around the black hole. Now, the collaboration has revealed a new look at the black hole, showing what it looks like in polarized light. 

Polarized light waves have a different orientation and brightness compared with unpolarized light. And, just like how light is polarized when it passes through some sunglasses, light is polarized when it's emitted in magnetized and hot areas of space. 

To capture the black hole, the collaboration used eight telescopes from around the world, combining their power to create a virtual Earth-sized telescope (the EHT). 

"The radio telescopes of the EHT have receivers that record the sky signal in polarized light," Ivan Marti-Vidal, also a coordinator of the EHT Polarimetry Working Group and GenT Distinguished Researcher at the Universitat de Valencia in Spain, told Space.com. "These polarized receivers work in a way similar to that of the polarized sunglasses that some people use.

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