The supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87 has a mass of 6.5 billion solar masses and is 55 million light-years away.
The shadow itself measures 40 billion kilometers, and the event horizon is approximately 2.5 times smaller.
Galaxy M87 is the largest and brightest object in the constellation Virgo, and we saw the first shadow images of the event horizon in April 2019.
At that time, data about the black hole came from a combination of 8 telescopes spread across our planet.
Now NASA has released new images.
They were made by as many as 19 telescopes and show this black hole from many perspectives, and more precisely at different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. NASA boasts that as many as 760 scientists from almost 200 different institutions around the world participated in this whole new endeavor.
Maybe these images are not as spectacular as the ones from 2019, but for researchers these new ones have a much greater scientific value, because they show the power of these objects in a much broader sense. Scientists intend to continue studying the black hole at the center of the galaxy M87
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Thanks to new observation instruments and measurements, we will be able to learn more about their functioning, as well as use them to check elements of Einstein's general theory of relativity.