新奇事件簿 天文学家首次拍到黑洞（在线收听）

Astronomers have taken the first ever photograph of a black hole. It is located in a far, distant galaxy called M87, which is 500 million trillion km from Earth. That gargantuan number is a five followed by twenty zeroes. Scientists estimate the black hole to have a diameter of 40 billion km and to be three million times larger than our planet. Lead astronomer Professor Heino Falcke spoke to the BBC about the black hole. He said: "What we see is larger than the size of our entire Solar System. It has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. And it is one of the heaviest black holes that we think exists. It is an absolute monster - the heavyweight champion of black holes in the Universe."

天文学家拍下了首张黑洞照片。其位于遥远的M87星系，距离地球500万光年。这个庞大的数字是5后边跟了20个零。科学家预测该黑洞直径400亿千米，比我们的地球大300万倍。领头天文学家Heino Falcke教授就黑洞对话BBC。他表示：“我们所看到的是比我们整个太阳系还要大的物体。它的质量是太阳的65亿倍。是我们认为存在的黑洞中最重的黑洞之一。它是一个绝对的怪物—是宇宙黑洞中的重量级冠军。”

The image of the black hole was captured by an array of eight linked telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). No single telescope exists that is powerful enough to capture the image. Each of the EHT telescopes is located high up on volcanoes in Hawaii and Mexico, mountains in the USA and Spain, a desert in Chile, and in Antarctica. A team of 200 scientists pointed the networked telescopes towards the M87 galaxy and scanned it over a period of 10 days. The data they gathered was stored on hundreds of hard drives. It was then collated and processed to produce the image that is now a landmark in space exploration. Professor Sheperd Doeleman called it "an extraordinary scientific feat".

黑洞的照片是由8个名为事件视界望远镜（EHT）的望远镜捕捉的。现在还没有任何一个望远镜能够捕捉这个画面。这8个EHT望远镜分别位于夏威夷和墨西哥火山高处、美国和西班牙的山区、智利的沙漠以及南极洲。由200名科学家组成的团队将网络化望远镜对准M87星系并在10天内对其进行检测。他们收集的数据被储存在数百个硬盘内。然后进行核对加工才得出了这幅太空探索里程碑式的画面。Sheperd Doeleman教授称其是“一个非凡的科学壮举”。