How researchers at the IRAM 30m Telescope captured the first ever image of a black hole

The 30-metre telescope in the Spanish Sierra Nevada operated by the Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique (IRAM) is the most sensitive single dish of the EHT array. It was the only station in Europe to participate in the 2017 observation campaign. IRAM's partner organizations are the German Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the Spanish Instituto Geographico Nacional.

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As we look beyond our local group of galaxies and further into the cosmic vicinity, we find at about 55 million light years a galaxy of exceptional size: M87. This is a gigantic elliptical galaxy that hosts in its very center an active ultra-massive black hole.

The existence of black holes is now generally accepted but they have never been imaged until today.

With the Event Horizon Telescope we try to do just that : it’s a world-wide astronomical project that links the most sensitive radio telescopes on 4 continents to take the first-ever image of a black hole.

The EHT array is going after what’s known as the event horizon.
This is the invisible boundary thought to surround all black holes, a point beyond which light cannot return.

The regions around supermassive black holes experience the most extreme conditions that we know of in the universe today.

To observe M87, astronomers need to reach a sensitivity and spatial resolution which would be capable of reading the text of a newspaper in New York by a reader situated in Europe.

To achieve this level of resolution, EHT synchronises facilities around the world and exploits the rotation of our planet to form one huge telescope with a theoretical aperture equal to the diameter of Earth itself.

Actually, IRAM’s facilities are the only telescopes on European ground that match the specific requirements for this global project.

Its large surface with accuracies better than the width of a human hair, is extremely sensitive and well adapted to detect even weak sources.

In April 2017, the EHT array pointed for the first time its antennas to the center of M87 and its supermassiv black hole.
It took us several months to collect the data from all of the telescopes because some of them are built at remote locations with difficult access like the South Pole.
It took us even longer to analyze the data but the results really exceeded all our expectations:

We actually managed to see the black hole shadow, illuminated by the glow of warped light as it gets sucked into the event horizon.

We got it - it was there right before our eyes ! The very first image of a black hole shadow.

And this historical result is exactly what was predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

These observations also confirm the incredibly large mass of the black hole in M87 which is several billion times the mass of our sun.

The NOEMA observatory, which is IRAM’s second facility, joined the EHT array in late 2018.
It is the most powerful observatory of its kind in the Northern Hemisphere.

With its high-precision antennas NOEMA gives the EHT array a sensitivity and spatial resolution which have never been obtained before.

The next EHT observations are already scheduled. Here at IRAM we are getting ready for the next big challenge.

With this first image we made history, now we want to go even further and take the first ever picture of a black hole in the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

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Credits:
IRAM : https://www.iram-institute.org/
Film by Denis Ramos // CINEDIA https://www.cinedia.fr