Astronomers Were Watching a Black Hole When It Suddenly Exploded With Gamma Rays
Woah. Blast Radius In 2018, astronomers took the first-ever picture of a black hole, a fascinating and unprecedented glimpse of an event horizon. And as it turns out, the black hole — dubbed M87* and located some 55 million light-years away — also let out a massive belch of gamma rays while scientists from the Event Horizon Telescope team, an international collaboration combining data from sensors around the globe, were getting a closer look. The campaign gathered data from 25 terrestrial and orbital telescopes in April 2018, and scientists are still poring over the results. “We were lucky to detect a gamma-ray flare from M87 during this Event Horizon Telescope’s multi-wavelength campaign,” said University of Trieste Giacomo Principe, coauthor of a new paper accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, in a statement. “This marks the first gamma-ray flaring event observed in this source in over a decade, allowing us to precisely constrain the size of the region responsible for the observed gamma-ray emission.” Violent Delights The team is hoping the gamma ray outburst data …