Decorative Image

Milky Way’s Black Hole Was “Birth Cry” of Radio Astronomy

The new image of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy made with the Event Horizon Telescope brings radio astronomy back to its celestial birthplace. The EHT image provides the closest look yet at the region from which radio waves from beyond the Earth were first detected in 1932 — by Karl Jansky, the father of radio astronomy.

Invisible Colors: Why Astronomers Use Different Radio Bands

Radio light is invisible to our eyes, so it’s easy to think of all radio light as the same. But radio is filled with colors, just as the colors of visible light we can see, and radio astronomy is at its most powerful when we use all the colors of its rainbow.

New Images Reveal Magnetic Structures Near Supermassive Black Hole

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — the worldwide collaboration that produced the first image of a black hole in 2019 — has produced a new image showing details of the magnetic fields in the region closest to the supermassive black hole at the core of the galaxy M87. The new work is providing astronomers with important clues about how powerful jets of material can be produced in that region.