Listeners of popular Cape Town radio station HeartFM, were treated to an exciting breakfast interview between Associate Professor Carolina Ödman-Govender and Aden Thomas on the #HeartBreakfast radio show.
This interview broadly forms part of Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy’s outreach activities, which aims engage the public scientific topics and discoveries. The interview highlighted the phenomena of black holes in particular, and more specifically, that this black 500 million trillion km away and was photographed by a network of eight telescopes across the world. Details have been published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters. It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of eight linked telescopes.
More importantly, this breakthrough discovery was carried out with the contribution of University of Pretoria astrophysicist and IDIA Senior Researcher, Assoc. Professor Roger Deane. Assoc. Professor Roger Deane was part of an international group of scientists who made history by unveiling the first ever image of a black hole.
The podcast of the radio interview can be listened to from here.
Source: HeartFM
Image: This artist’s impression depicts a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole surrounded by an accretion disc. This thin disc of rotating material consists of the leftovers of a Sun-like star which was ripped apart by the tidal forces of the black hole. Shocks in the colliding debris as well as heat generated in accretion led to a burst of light, resembling a supernova explosion.
Source: Event Horizon Telescope
Credit: ESO, ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser/N. Bartmann