Dr. Joey Neilsen, Assistant Professor of Physics, and his student Jadyn Anczarski (CLAS ’20) contributed to efforts to capture the first image of a black hole. On April 10, the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration announced the detection of the “shadow" of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, some 55 million light years away. This shadow represents the void in space from which no light emerges, and it tells us of a black hole with a mass of 6.5 billion suns that takes up less space than our solar system. Dr. Neilsen and Anczarski analyzed supporting X-ray observations of M87 from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the NuSTAR X-ray telescope to help understand the high-energy jets from M87.
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* Villanova University Media Relations. (2019, April 10). Astronomers Capture First Image of a Black Hole [Press Release]. Retrieved from https://www1.villanova.edu/villanova/media/pressreleases/2019/0410.html