Observing these longer wavelengths gave astronomers an entirely new window into the universe, allowing them to detect radio emission produced by the glow of faint faraway heat sources and exotic physics capable of accelerating charged particles in extreme and unexpected ways. By 1940, Reber was publishing in The Astrophysical Journal, and his work seeded a broader interest in radio observations among the astronomical community. He found spots of bright radio emission that would later be identified as distant galaxies and the detritus left behind by recent supernovas. His efforts were wildly successful, reproducing Jansky’s observations and then creating the first radio map of the sky. His colleagues nicknamed the contraption “Jansky’s merry-go-round.” As a physicist and engineer at Bell Labs, he designed an enormous antenna 100 feet across and 20 feet tall mounted on a set of Model T tires so it could spin and point in any direction. Karl Jansky was working on precisely this goal when he first discovered “star noise” by accident in 1931. By the early 20th century, physicists knew the waves could also be produced by natural phenomena, like lightning, but they mainly wanted to avoid these pesky sources of “noise” to improve the clarity, power and reach of radio communication technology. Easy to make, with long wavelengths that allowed them to travel great distances unperturbed, radio waves were immediately seen as an excellent communication tool. The first detected radio waves, produced by the acceleration of charged particles, were generated artificially in the late 1800s. The radio regime lies at one extreme of the electromagnetic spectrum, where light waves have low energies. The science contained in the famous image may be mind-blowing, but the science that made it possible is impressive in its own right, allowing researchers working in concert across the planet an entirely new way to study the cosmos. This unprecedented picture of one of the most mysterious objects in all of physics is the latest in a long line of discoveries made possible by radio astronomy. Even the newly hewn lines represent telltale signatures of a strong magnetic field. The tiny details of the picture have revealed that the black hole is spinning clockwise and consuming the equivalent of hundreds of Earth masses every year. At a glance it may not look like much - a fuzzy glowing doughnut, bulging slightly at the bottom and, as of last month, streaked with curving lines - but in reality this unassuming circle is humanity’s first glimpse of a black hole, with the colors chosen not to mimic realism, but to indicate the intensity of radio emissions.Ĭaptured in a picture so sharp that it was like reading the date on a quarter in Los Angeles while standing in Washington, D.C., the image revealed a black hole 6.5 billion times more massive than our own sun at the heart of a galaxy 55 million light-years away. If you ask an astronomer to choose the single most exciting picture in all of astronomy, many of us will point to a familiar orange ring.
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