NASA began 2019 with a bang, when the agency’s New Horizons spacecraft completed a flyby of 2014 MU69, the most distant object ever visited by humans, in the wee hours of January 1. NASA finally heard back from New Horizons around 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, several hours after it had already zipped past MU69, which is 4.1 billion miles away from Earth. The flyby, occurring as the spacecraft was blasting through space at over 30,000 miles per hour, had only one shot of success.

Before the flyby, we only had the weakest glimpses of MU69. The best was a six-pixel photo taken from over half a million kilometers away, showing us a peanut- or bowling ball-shaped figure about 21 miles in length.

But, as succinctly summed up by the Southwest Research Institute’s Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, during a press conference held Wednesday, “that image is so 2018.” The New Horizons team at NASA is finally getting around to sifting through all of the incredible images and bits of data collected by the spacecraft’s seven science instruments during the flyby, and yesterday, NASA officially released the first close-up images of MU69, the best of which is nearly 20,000 pixels in size, taken from as close as 17,000 miles away.

What we’re left with is a clearer view of the double-lobed object: “that bowling pin is gone,” said Stern. “It’s a snowman if anything.” The large and small lobes’ volumes differ by about a three-to-one ratio.

And there’s much more we’ve gleaned in just the first sets of data. We now know for certain that MU69 emits a red color, and that the larger lobe (12 miles across) has a rotational period of about 15 hours, give or take an hour. When it comes to reflectivity, MU69 is “like potting soil,” said Cathy Olkin, the mission’s deputy project scientist, also based at the Southwest Research Institute. “This is a very dark object.” The brightest spots of the rock only reflect about 13 percent of the incidence of sunlight, while the darkest spots reflect a paltry 6 percent.

“When I look at these pictures, I really think of it as the essence of exploration,” Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate director of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said at Wednesday’s press conference.

MU69 is located in the vast reaches of the Kuiper belt, the icy portion of the solar system that exists beyond Neptune’s orbit. MU69 is not exactly an exotic world—it shares the same typical traits as most of the other objects in the region. But like its geological neighbors, it’s thought to possess some insight into the origins of the solar system itself.

“We think what we’re looking at is perhaps the most primitive object that has yet been seen by any spacecraft,” said Jeff Moore, New Horizons’ geology lead scientist based at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “These are the only remaining basic building blocks in the backyard of the solar system that we can see.” Moore likens New Horizons to a “time machine” that could unravel some of the biggest mysteries of the early solar system.

For example, MU69’s spherical lobes strongly suggest the rock wasn’t formed by a high-impact collision of two objects, but rather as a soft meeting. The object most likely formed separately as aggregations of smaller icy pebbles, and eventually started a romantic orbital dance around one another, slowly coming together until they simply joined up, with a rocky neck building up between the two spheres. As opposed to a violent crash of two objects, “you can think of it more like a docking of spacecraft” occurring at an extremely slow speed, said Moore.

That sort of insight can help scientists better understand the formation of planets, within the solar system and potentially in other star systems as well. These findings are “going to revolutionize our knowledge of planetary science,” said Stern.

There is plenty more for the New Horizons team to unveil. Tomorrow will bring another round of new scientific data to unpack, and the team says its highest-resolution images, which should be on the scale of a megapixel, are yet to be processed and released. We’ll have more coming up as the New Horizons team unveils more of MU69’s secrets.

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NASA’s New Horizons mission gave us quite the New Year’s treat last month when it revealed that 2014 MU69 was basically a giant snowman floating around the outskirts of the solar system. Comprised of two large spheres stuck together, the double-lobed object 4.1 billion miles away was stranger than we ever anticipated.

Well, hang on to your butts, because things are about to get even stranger: new data processed by the New Horizons team shows us that MU69 is actually flat. Instead of two spherical blobs, it’s really more like two flattened rocks that came together at one point and got stuck, like pancakes cooked side by side on a pan meeting at a neck where the batter merged.

“This really is an incredible image sequence, taken by a spacecraft exploring a small world four billion miles away from Earth,” said the Southwest Research Institute’s Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, in a press release. “Nothing quite like this has ever been captured in imagery.”

MU69 is the most distant world a human spacecraft has ever encountered and studied in detail, and its mysteries continue to excite the scientific community. Over this past New Year’s, the New Horizons spacecraft zipped past the rock at more than 31,000 miles per hour, getting as close as 2,200 miles away from the 21-mile-long object.

Previous images released by NASA confirmed the double-lobe shape of MU69, but higher-resolution photographs showed the reddish object was much more globular than predicted. The new images, taken in the wee morning hours of January 1 from about 5,494 miles from MU69, help reveal that on its side, the rock retains a thin, crescent-like shape. While the larger lobe is flatter, the smaller lobe is a bit more spherical, like a large nut.

The new analysis is incredible, but it undoubtedly raises more questions as to how these objects first formed in the Kuiper Belt, and how they eventually came together. The New Horizons team believes the two lobes met softly long ago (like a car bumper-kissing another car, rather than a furious collision), and a singular neck eventually formed to solidify the merging of the two bodies. But the shape of the two lobes is quite unusual and will require more time to understand.

Earth may not be flat, but as it turns out, you can’t say the same for all other worlds in the solar system.

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Update: On Wednesday morning, scientists unveiled the first ever picture of a black hole. See below for background info on this endeavor, and check back soon for more.

Black holes are a strange celestial phenomenon to describe. They exert gravity that’s so powerful, not even light can escape their grip. And despite how powerful our technology for observing space is these days, we’ve still never been able to snap a picture of a black hole—ever.

All of that is poised to change in less than 24 hours, thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)—an eight-telescope project switched on in April 2017. Its mission: to peer out into space and attempt to snap the first-ever image of a black hole. The EHT has an announcement scheduled for Wednesday at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time, and nearly everyone is expecting to hear that the project has successfully imaged Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Or, more specifically, that the project has imaged the black hole’s event horizon, the “point of no return” boundary beyond which nothing can escape the object’s gargantuan gravitational force.

The observatories involved weren’t tasked with taking a conventional photo of Sagittarius A*, which has the mass of 4 million suns. Instead, they were synchronized to observe radiation emitted by the event horizon’s bright ring of material, which could help illustrate the silhouette of the supermassive black hole itself. They were turned on for just nine days, but managed to collect a wallop of data that’s taken two years to transfer, process, and analyze in order to stitch together a visual (we hope) of the object itself.

This is a pretty tall order when we’re talking about an object that’s more than 25,000 light-years in the distance, but EHT has a resolution that can, as MIT puts it, “count the stitches on a baseball 8,000 miles away.” Combined, the eight telescopes boast an optical power 1,000-times that of the Hubble Space Telescope.

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Imaging a black hole is a lot more consequential than just having something new to post to Instagram. “An image like this can affirm that Einstein’s general relativity is the correct theory to describe gravity when it is very strong, and can tell us about what actually happens around the black hole,” says Roger Blandford, a theoretical astrophysicist based at Stanford University who was not directly involved with EHT. “It’s the stage and the play.” It’s also a proof-of-concept for a type of technology and observational methodology that could push astronomy to new heights. “Success in making an image would allow the EHT project to go on to make more and finer images,” he says.

That’s assuming the announcement is what we’re all expecting it to be, but there’s no guarantee this will be the case. Not even journalists were given a sneak preview to the findings, so the entire world is expecting to learn about the EHT’s grand discovery all at once. You can watch the National Science Foundation’s livestream of the announcement (embedded above), and head over to read PopSci’s coverage of the findings shortly after.

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Scientists with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) announced Wednesday that they’ve successfully imaged the event horizon of a supermassive black hole at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, nearly 55 million light-years away from Earth. A fiery maelstrom, the new image comes two years after the team initially captured their data, and ends a long wait for one of the most exciting astrophysical endeavors in modern memory.

“Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe,” Sheperd Doeleman, the director of EHT and a scientist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told the audience at a National Science Foundation press conference in Washington, D.C. “Because they are so small, we’ve never seen one. We are delighted to be able to report to you today that we have seen, and taken an image, of a black hole.”

The gravity exerted by a black hole is so powerful that light cannot even escape it, which obviously makes it nigh impossible to actually take a picture of one. But black holes possess what’s called an event horizon: a boundary designating the point of no return. Light and matter that cross this threshold will not escape the black hole, but spacetime is warped at the event horizon such that it creates a glowing circle of accreting matter. It creates a sort of silhouette of the object—that’s what the EHT captured.

Despite the name, EHT is actually a project comprised of eight different telescopes at different observatories around the world operating in synchronicity to image the black holes in the center of M87 as well as the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, Sagittarius A*. EHT made its first data capture in 2006, and has since added more and more observatories to its network, which now includes submillimeter telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona, Chile, Antarctica, Mexico, and Spain. Doeleman explained that M87’s supermassive black hole was the first source they imaged, but they are currently working to image Sagittarius A*.

The new picture comes from data captured over a span of nine days in April 2017. It’s taken two years to actually unpack and analyze all of the observatories’ data, in part because the files are too massive to transfer digitally. Hard drives had to be physically ferried from the observatories in order for scientists to process the data. The Antarctic dataset, in particular, remained inaccessible for months because of extreme weather.

Roger Blandford, a theoretical astrophysicist at Stanford University who was not involved with EHT, told Popular Science the image is a “tribute to the hard work by the team and 50 years of ingenuity by radio astronomers before them honing the craft of interferometry.”

The different observatories that make up the EHT are all can make different radiofrequency observations of different objects in space. In this instance, they were all aligned to look at the radiation emitted by each black hole’s event horizon, working in concert to provide the sort of extreme optical resolution necessary to image something so small and so far away. Daniel Marrone, an astronomer at the University of Arizona and a member of the EHT team, told the audience at Wednesday’s press conference that while the black hole is 6.5 billion times the mass of the sun, the event horizon is basically just one-and-a-half light-days across. For reference, M87 itself, already an impressive body to image at 55 million light-years away, is 120 light-years in diameter. Doeleman calls the feat the “equivalent of being able to read the date on a quarter in LA when we’re standing here in Washington, D.C.”

Before the announcement, it wasn’t quite clear exactly what EHT was going to reveal to the world. Andrea Isella, a Rice University astronomer who was not involved with the project, told Popular Science beforehand that while we’ve obviously never had direct observations of Sagittarius A*, we’ve known about its existence for decades. We can observe its gravitational effects on objects in the vicinity. “We see stars orbiting around something that doesn’t meet any optical light,” he says. “From this motion, we can measure the mass of the black hole—estimations on the order of millions of solar masses.”

Blandford previously highlighted the image’s potential for affirming whether Einstein’s theory of general relativity—the model for how we characterize the relationship of gravity and spacetime—could correctly describe how gravity works in relation to these ultra-massive behemoths, perhaps shedding more light on the properties of black holes themselves. While general relativity has already been tested many times through weaker situations like gravitational lensing (how light bends when it crosses massive objects), it’s never been tested in a strong gravitational field like a black hole.

The EHT team on Wednesday affirmed that the new data is consistent with previous models used to characterize both black holes and general relativity. Avery Broderick from University of Waterloo explains that were Einstein wrong, the silhouette of the black hole could have looked very different—misshapen, or even missing entirely. Instead, it was circular and conformed to structural expectations.

“Today, general relativity has passed another crucial test,” says Broderick.

“To some extent, black holes are actually very simple objects,” says Isella. They are defined by what he explains are two major parameters: mass (which is already estimated through the orbit of the stars around it), and rotational spin. An image of a black hole can give you a direct line into figuring out these parameters. Any significant deviations from what we expect mean that there is some critical missing piece we haven’t yet considered. But the new image is encouraging news that everything we’ve learned about black holes, without even having seen one, has been on point.

The new findings will influence myriad astrophysical and cosmological investigations. In the immediate future, Blandford hopes “they will help us understand what happens to gas and magnetic fields outside the event horizon, how the disks of gas swirling around the black hole behave, and how relativistic jets [ionized matter expelled at the speed of light] are made.” Broderick explained the data has already been used to determined M87’s black hole spins clockwise, and possesses a bright crescent-like feature with a dark interior.

Down the road, Blandford thinks astronomers could use the data to get a better glimpse of the behavior of individual stars orbiting the galactic center, and the role of hot gas just outside black holes in influencing the spin of the objects themselves. EHT team member Sera Markoff from the University of Amsterdam discussed how this type of work can be used to better understand how jets of radiation and particles expelled by black holes affect galactic growth and evolution.

But besides the scientific relevance of the image, there’s also a technological milestone here worth highlighting. EHT is, in many ways, a kind of proof-of-concept for acquiring high-resolution images of a celestial object that’s very small and very far away. Accomplishing this type of feat basically opens up a whole methodology for conducting more audacious astronomical investigations.

“A big chunk of investigations in astronomy deal with trying to image very small objects,” says Isella. “The implication is, we should be able to add more telescopes and achieve better quality images moving forward, as well as image other black holes,” said Isella.

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That may not be greatly apparent on first glance of the image, which is certainly blurrier than most of the public might have hoped. The image is compressed a million times over from 5,000 terabytes’ worth of data, and the sharpness unfortunately still seems to fall off. But it could be made better through different approaches in follow-up observations, like in employing new algorithms, and the addition of more telescopes with higher frequency.

In fact, astronomy is already well-used to that sort of step-by-step process. Take a planet like Pluto, for example. Our very first view of the dwarf planet was an absolute mess by today’s standards, but with time, we managed to find something that much more closely resembled an actual planet with surface features. And it wouldn’t be until the New Horizons flyby, 85 years after we snagged the first image of Pluto, that we could finally see its hazy atmosphere, rock formations, and true surface colors.

The team will have 11 telescopes under the project by 2020, and Doeleman and his colleagues expressed a desire to eventually put a telescope in space to further their efforts. While the new image of M87’s supermassive black hole has not radically changed our understanding of the universe, it helps open the door to a whole new view of space.

“We’ve exposed part of the universe that we thought were invisible to us before,” said Doeleman. “Nature has conspired to let us see something that we thought was invisible.”

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