Breakthrough discovery in astronomy: first ever image of a black hole

yeah [Music] good afternoon and welcome everybody to today's press conference where we will unveil the results achieved by the global scientific consortium event horizon telescope which aims to capture the first image of a black hole a very warm welcome to all of you especially those who have travelled from across Europe to be here today we have very little time before the actual announcement goes live across the globe in six simultaneous press conferences so I will break with protocol a little and hand the floor directly to European Research Commissioner Carlos with us and then we will turn to the five leading scientists here on stage with us involved in the discovery commissioner thank you very much let me put the timer thank you so much and it's a great honor to be here today we really about to announce a huge breakthrough for Humanity we are about to take a picture a picture of something that one man one man alone dreamt imagine 100 years ago in 1915 Albert Einstein imagined that this idea that a very big weight transforms geometry but when the mass is too heavy you make a hole a mysterious hole where nothing can get out of it where all it's absorbed Michael Kramer here from the ERC said the history of science will be divided into the time before the image and the time after the image and you know for my generation it's all about the imagination of something that was in between science and fiction at the age of 9 I went with my father to watch the movie black hole and I remember coming home and for the first time in my life nine years old thinking about what's the meaning of life what am I doing here is there any parallel universe that's what's really got me excited and probably the question that we have to ask to us to every down here that we love science is to think about what about in 100 years Einstein was there 100 years ago but in 100 years what have we and what will be the discovers the things that we'll discover from these knowledge you know I see Robert de Graaff there that wrote a great book about the usefulness of useless knowledge and Einstein could not imagine it could not imagine what he discovered he cannot imagine that one day because he created and discovered the antimatter that that would create the PET scan that will save lives all over the world so I'm really proud I'm proud of science I'm proud of science because science today is giving a lesson to politicians he's showing that today to take a picture of something that one man grant 100 years ago you need people from 40 different countries you need people from all over the world but at the same time that you're sitting here there's six press conferences in Washington in Tokyo in Taipei in Shanghai and in Santiago de Chile and I'm proud of Europe I'm proud of Europe because we have invested so much in this project we have put all together more than 44 million euros because we can be proud that Europe has a winning formula and that winning formula is simple we believe deeply in the freedom of science we believe that scientists are the ones to make the choices that the choices of science are not done by politicians we believe somehow in the intuition of science Stephen Hawking once said something that I would like to finish these words today we do with this excitement of us he said it is said that facts are sometimes stranger than fiction and know where these more true than in the case of black holes black holes are stranger than anything dreamed up by science fiction writers but they are firmly matters of science fact so ladies and gentlemen I think that I've not been these excited since when I came in 2014 if there's a big moment for all of us is today and so this big moment is shared with so many in the public so many today here and I want to invite all the team and for that professor Hina Falcon is here so he will come immediately to my place and tell you and we will join all of us here in the room will join him unveiling the image so professor please come and I'll go I still have to [Applause] now I have to fill the time actually until we allowed to actually you know start the unveiling sequence I thought I used the time to introduce our team here that's here today on stage with Monika Moshe Brad suka from the Radford University working on theory and imaging of black holes leshawna with solo from the great University in Frankfurt we have Eduardo of course from the Max Planck Institute for radio astronomy and we have Antoine Sene's was the director of the Max Planck Institute for radio astronomy in Bonn and also chair of the board of the event horizon telescope and we have you know a lot of team members here in the front row Michele camos already mentioned our co PI you have a remote Elin was the project manager of the event horizon telescope glad you here with us today Colin Lonsdale who is a co-chair of the event horizon telescope project now we have to start with the session we are looking into space into towards the galaxies a giant galaxy 500 billion billion light years away from us sorry five hundred billion billion kilometres away from us very big galaxy was which was suspected to host a supermassive black hole in the very center hundred and one years ago someone discovered a streak of light which is plasma shooting out of the centre of the Milky Way marking the supermassive black hole I never believed that this black hole was as big as people said until we saw that this is the nucleus of the galaxy m87 and this is the first ever image of a black hole that's das ist beard - Watson this is the first image of a black hole cut cela premia emerged in genoa what you're seeing here is the result of many many people working together you have many probably seen many many images of black holes before but they were all simulations or animations and this is suppression pressures to all of us because this one is finally real what you're looking at actually looks like a ring of fire and it's actually created by the 4th of gravity but the deformation of space-time where light actually goes around a black hole almost in a circle and that creates that circle that we see here it has a diameter of I forgot the number actually 109 actually it's a hundred hundred billion kilometers now now I got it right it has hundred billion kilometers but actually at the at the distance as a huge distance of m87 it actually appear as a mustard seed in Washington DC as seen here from Brussels the size of the ring is actually determined by the mass of the black hole and very independent of all the parameters of the black hole all the modeling and so we can derive from that size directly what the mass is and it's six and a half billion times the mass of the Sun that is an enormous black hole that we see there we see also more in there we see this dark region in the middle I've always been asked by my colleagues or told by my colleagues you cannot see a black hole can you I think they're right you cannot see a black hole but you can actually see its shadow and that's when the light actually disappears behind the event horizon creating that dark region that dark shadow we see there and this is amazing if you think about it where if you know the story behind that image we're looking at reaching that we've never looked at before reach we cannot really imagine being there it feels like really looking at the gates of Hell at the end of space and time the event horizon the point of no return that is awe-inspiring to me at least but it's also important for physics I think my colleague would channel at solar will now continue and explain to us why this is so important cuesta la prima imagine you MOOC on error so black holes are part of our daily knowledge in fact even a child knows what a black hole is and the best definition I've received actually comes from a child who simply said well it's just a hole you cannot fill so they're very simple but actually extremely problematic in physics and because of the properties they have the first property is that a dev center in a single point we think the laws of physics break down we call this point a singularity another property is that this singularity is covered by a surface a mathematical surface which is called the event horizon gravity is so strong on this surface that nothing not even light can leave it and this surface separates the interior from the exterior and nothing from the interior can leave and be transmitted to the exterior and for a scientist this is a drama because scientists want to know everything about every corner of the universe so having a region where you say you cannot experiment there oh you can experiment there but you cannot tell the results of the of the experiment is extremely frustrating and puzzling and the same positing thought was shared by by Einstein so how do you get to terms you come to terms with this idea well the first thing you want to do is convince yourself that black holes exist and in particularly event horizon exist and the image we have produced does exactly that so you may wonder how do you know it is a black hole and it is because it matches extremely well with the prediction that we can do from theory and is if shown in this picture over here so on the left there is the observed image on the right there is a theoretical prediction and as you can see the analogy is remarkable as a matter of fact we have carried out over these last six months the most extensive investigation of what happens to plasma to matter as we falls onto a black hole we have used supercomputers and highly advanced numerical codes to calculate what happens and what we've learned is that as matter falls onto the black hole it will start rotating at speeds which are close to the speed of light and will become hot and emit light especially in the radio frequencies which are the ones that our telescopes can capture but these simulations are not sufficient if you want to know what a black hole looks like as an image you need to take into account that light doesn't move on straight line in near a black hole just contrary to this room light can come from all sorts of places and so light can can be bent can be lensed and so the image that you obtain by looking at a black hole can be very counterintuitive and we have carried out a very extensive investigation we built tens of thousands of synthetic images which cover all the possibilities that we think are realistic conditions under which a black hole is formed and this is how we have come to conclude that this is a black hole as predicted by Einstein now you may ask what is the meaning of this discovery for many of us it has different meanings but there is one meaning that we all share and is very precious to us we have transformed a mathematical concept that of the event horizon something that I normally write on a blackboard when I lecture on this into a physical object something that we can test and we can measure and we can observe repeatedly and you may think this is a minor thing actually this is a fundamental first step in any scientific progress it's a scientific method be able to make an experiment and they'd use from this what are you know how does nature work and now I'll leave the word to my colleague Eduardo Rose to explain how this beautiful experiment was first carried out so astronomy is not something that you do just from your desk in many cases you have to embark in an expedition and two years ago a large team of astronomers and marking in expeditions to the most remote places on earth in places where the atmosphere is thin and dry because we need to observe at a wavelength where the atmosphere is important and the important thing of that is in these locations are also facilities as you see they're like in on thirty meter telescope or Alma or up X with European technology and in these telescopes the team of astronomers when they are prepared with one eye into the weather forecast checking up all the systems of the telescopes checking that everything works and waiting for the go command when the weather was good in all these sites around the earth one of the things you need to make such an image of a black hole is to get a telescope as big as the earth and to get that the small pieces of this telescope are parabolic antennas which you can see the locations in the picture there these teams were observing that we had a fantastic good luck because we get good weather all across the globe at the locations of the telescopes these data where stars in starting disks because you cannot you can you not have optical fibers there you have to fill boxes of hard disks pack them into an airplane in some cases waiting for several months like in the South Pole until the winter over is gone because it was night in April 2000 2000 and 2017 you weigh them and these data are sent to processing centers where they are played back as they were recorded and synchronized with atomic clocks these places are like in the haystack Observatory in Massachusetts in the US or in Bourne Mustang Institute they are the so called correlators data are playback they are evaluated and then they are given to a further team who checks this data every telescope is different you need to correct for the characteristics of each telescope put all that together so that you get a telescope as large as the earth and this process needed also several months of hard work assessment iterations until people were sure ok this is the data that now we can begin to image we can extract the information from this precious data which occupy 6 cubic meters of of disk as I said to get something like the image you have this scene now and to know how you extract this information and you get from that my colleague Monica Marcia vodka which was you may wonder how this image was made in the first place event horizon telescope data is like in complete puzzle set we actually only see a pieces of the real true image and then we have to fill in these gaps of these missing pieces to construct the physically possible image that is actually matching our data this is actually a very difficult process therefore the imaging process has been split into several phases at first at the very beginning we were working on this imaging completely alone each of us this was remarkable almost life-changing experience to see an image of a black hole shadow popping out on the screens of our ordinary laptops next we form independent teams that works completely independent and from each other to repeat the imaging process this was very necessary important step because we wanted to get rid of the human bias as much as possible and Allah in the last phase we took the longest time the imaging was done very very carefully we are very careful scientific analysis so what have we learned from from the images and not just from the images also from the data there that are lying down lying underneath this image so first of all we have observed the source for four days over the four days the ring is there the the image looks almost exactly the same we have also measured the size of this ring over four days the size is always the same it doesn't change we have also measured the contrast between the ring itself and the central darkness and the contrast is as large as it is as it is expected for the black hole shadow but there is one more very peculiar thing about this ring it's not really a full ring it actually is much brighter bright at the bottom side why is that our mothers told us immediately that this kind of structure can be only formed if the source if something in the source is rotating what is rotating it could be the black hole but also the matter around it our boss can be rotating at the moment the images are not yet sharp enough to actually estimate or calculate the exact speed of this rotation but these images give us a sense of the direction of the rotation which is a clockwise in the sky so to summarise our images our data tell us that we are looking at the shadow of the black hole which has been predicted by the other models of the black holes that we have developed over the last few decades and now Anton's answers will give you will share some final remarks on a current state and the future of the event horizon telescope thank you so my job now is to put it all together for you the event horizon telescope is a very ambitious project but one with a very clear goal we want to image for the first time the central black holes in the galaxy m87 and in the Milky Way today now six papers are appearing in the Astrophysical Journal Letters especially edition that show the image and all the discussion that is needed to convince our scientific colleagues and in a few days the data from our observations will be made public so that scientists anywhere in the world can verify our results so how have you made this happen we had to assemble a fleet a capable fleet of the best and most sensitive millimeter wave radio telescopes in the world combined the supercomputers to form one large radio telescope we had to organize a team that now numbers to more than 200 scientists from many institutions around the world this is a truly global collaboration we cannot name all the people that are participating in this but representative for all of them I want to recognize Colleen Lonsdale director of haystack observatory and together with my co-chair of the EHD collaboration board he represents together with our other friends here the global partnership that we have all the people that now are listening elsewhere that worked together on this project the preparation for these observations took a long time I spoken this morning to somebody who started 40 years ago building millimeter telescopes and so you can say several decades of preparation went into what in 2017 was for the team a very very difficult a complicated experiment to perform this experiment was successful this story is not a story of one hero instead there are many heroes to this story I'm proud to work with these people and we salute their achievement a number of them are here in the room today ready to meet you later so in Europe how were we able to play a leading role in this endeavor for most it is to combining forces we have brought together astronomers observers theoreticians and facilities together we in fact were able to make a much better result than we would have been able to do individually of course in Europe we have direct access to some of the most powerful millimeter wave radio telescopes the Anstey to varias tsunami millimetric Iran's 30 meter telescope was a crucial element in the north Alma the Atacama Large millimeter are a where the European Southern Observatory is a key partner Mei was absolutely a game-changer it enabled us to get the sensitivity and the resolving power to make these images happen scientists in Europe for decades have collected the capabilities have have developed methods have acquired the excellent skills that were needed to participate in the scientific process in this project in all places and last the Scientific developed the technical development capability that we have to build instrumentation state-of-the-art instrumentation that we need is second to none here in Europe lastly lastly the public funds the taxpayer money that was spent on our basic research here both from national resources but also from the European Union from European Research Council and from raiding it was crucial and making this excellence happen we appreciate that very much and we hope we can come back so where we where we going from here m87 in the bag we are confident that very soon we'll complete the analysis of Sagittarius a star we will go back to observe and so please stay tuned we'll come back we already underway improving the array foremost Iran's expanded noemi array that they will soon finish will again be a game-changer for our trade Alma will offer us improved capabilities and the Greenland telescope and perhaps the African millimetre telescope project will make critical contributions to improving the quality of the EHT with all of this we are well placed to go into the next step of this journey I think that we will be able to confirm a lot of the signs that we expecting but much more important we will be able with this machine to make discoveries of the unexpected and that's the most fascinating in science I personally like to say that I will think of a time before and after I saw for the first time this image you mentioned this also today I believe for all of us marks the beginning of the day after for all of us thank you very much for your support and thank you for your interest in our science now we will be ready to take your questions thank you [Applause] thank you much for these presentations and I dare say our press room will always be open for such extraordinary announcements now we can turn to your media questions let me point out that we've published abandoned not only press material and words but more importantly audio-visual material on the Commission website may I please ask you to introduce yourselves by name and media starting in the middle thank you very much my name is Nicholas Wallace I'm policy editor science business my question is for commissioner what US you said that this is the most excited you've been since you took office in 2014 my question is do you expect any more excitement before your term ends and if not given that this was an international project that the Commission contributed to what should be next for the EU and international collaboration in science what do you think the next big thing should be for the next commissioner Thanks thank you very much for the the question and yes I mean I think that this is really the pinnacle I mean I I had exciting moments exciting political moments exciting when I was able to put forward to the College of Commissioners a proposal for 100 billion euros for the next science program that really made my heart beat very much and made me more nervous about it at the time in a positive way when then we went to the Parliament and the council and we discussed and a couple of weeks ago we achieved really something unique is that we had that agreement we the countries and the Parliament for the content of that problem of the future and so one of the things that is in that program answers your question which is that is link had between the citizens and science and how important is that and so we want to define this idea of the missions the and driven science because we want European citizens to feel connected and that connection that happened here today it's a proof of that you know I've never seen these rooms so full or if I've seen it was not for positive reasons were for reasons of crisis and not for positive things and it's so refreshing to come here to see so many people to see people clap I mean it's very rare in a press room to have people clapping and and so I think that is a sign for politicians that you should look at science in Europe as really the engine of growth and the only way forward to be the center and so in terms of international collaboration and I've said it so many times I really believe that this is all about the European program to be open to the world I mean we are discussing with countries like Canada New Zealand we're discussing around the world to have people that want to be part of the European program because the European program has the history of Europe is not about Europe is about getting people together is more than Europe we are bigger than that and that what makes European a center stage and so I think there's a really for the next couple of years that will be the mission the mission is to get everybody on board in a place that is quite unique you know I mean there's not a lot of places in the world where you have the funding that we have for fundamental science we have jean-pierre bourguignon sitting there with the European Research Council I mean that's quite unique and so I'm proud of that and yes today is a really a proud moment it's for for the question my name is Natalia Jack I'm with Bloomberg I was hoping that you could help us understand a bit what what impact this discovery has on our understanding of conventional physics laws and how that's going to change now especially with Albert Einstein's theory of relativity thank you so you know the theory is eagerly waiting for confirmations an ice and theory of relativity is the one that we know best and the one that has so far passed all the tests and this is not a very important test this is the first ever image and this gives us great confidence that relativity is the one we understand in the strong field regime what curvature is very very strong actually follows exactly what I son predicted it's literature there are a lot of ideas for alternatives of black holes and there's something you finally can actually test we only start just starting to do this we can now say it's not a wormhole for example but many other things we will test in the future but it can be done now now it becomes experimental science and we have Croatian ways and we have you know pulsars all testing gravity in an area in a regime which has been unaccessible before so I think this really transforms a study of gravity in a fundamental way you will need different methods different scales gentleman here in the front you can take a mic on your side and in the seat now I'm Davide castle Vicky from nature magazine how many questions do I get start with one and then we'll okay can you tell us if you found any information about Sagittarius a star I was to say was supposed to say that we actually focused all our attention on m87 when we saw the very first results because we knew this one's going to be awesome the the issue with Sagittarius a star is is thousand times smaller it's thousand times closer so it has the same shadow size but also times faster so if you want to take an image of that source it's like take an image of a toddler which moves around for eight hours and you try to get a still image while m87 is a big bear thousand times slower you know hibernating they're not moving much within this eight hours so that makes it much easier we were just lucky that m87 was so large it could have been much smaller we didn't know that before and so once we saw that we focus everything on that one so you know we'll still take a little more time to work on such a star we may come back to you later time permitting I think I saw some other show of hands yes back there Marco's first I leave Marcos Becker with their Spiegel I see that the black hole seem to behave nicely and follow the predictions but maybe you can explain to us what kinds of new insights you have gained and how they for the bases for possible new research and new insights in the future thank you so so far our observation is actually exactly what we have expected but I think there will be more possibilities in the future to investigate the behavior of this black hole we probably basically would have to make it take movies not just static images yeah we also can learn something about the jet formation this the supermassive black hole is very famous for is is huge kiloparsecs scale jet so now we know how this jet is actually coming out from the black hole so this is a huge new insight of how relativistic Jets are produced thank you then we had a question right in front of Marcus there yeah okay well maybe while you continue thinking about questions or we come back to the nature we also have a number of people following us on social media and online and they also had the opportunity to ask us questions so I'll take a couple of those firstly how can you take photos without light well radio is also light the radio waves as light as the eye that enters into these detectors we have here which are called eyes we use the light the waves that come from the remote black hole region in such a quite tricky way because the same light that arrives to the earth the same wave comes to all the different telescope and we drop this front of light in our computers we can then reproduce and play back that but this is also the radio light which is also the same light that comes into the mobile phones that we are working in the alum in the electromagnetic spectrum then we can use this light to see the black Hostin scene image is actually light that is produced by plasma around the black hole it's true that we cannot see the black how it's it's black so you cannot see it but we we see its shadow that is being cast on this glowing plasma so we are actually taking a picture of light one little detail we think that the black hole is actually really engulfed in an optically thin transparent glowing fog of radio emitting material and so the fact that you see nothing in the center is actually quite significant we'll take another question which i think is rather directed that the Commissioner Moyes which is how will the you support astronomy that we're now all very fascinated about in the next year research funding program I think first we support it in the name of our new program you see event horizon horizon Europe I never thought about that before but I think he's a good one I think that the way it's very important that Europe keeps on being the leader of fundamental science in the world I mean this where we are at our best and so when we approached on this proposal for the the countries and for the Parliament to go from 13 billion years for the European Research Council to 17 billion years of the European Research Council that's exactly about fundamental science and that's exactly to put these priority as European priority because if we can differentiate there I think that we can differentiate for the future of our children because what I love about fundamental science and I think that's where the question from the journalist over there which was but what do you take from here what are the impact in the things that we don't know the so many impacts that these will have in the future I think that it's same thing to look at the people that are young now the very young ones and think the impact that they will see from these in 50 years and the fact that we don't know and that's something that is for the good of Europe and for the good of the world so I think that we if there's a place in the world that invests in fundamental science it's us and we should keep doing that for the future so on the program horizon Europe we will keep investing very heavily on fundamental science of course my perspective and that is that it is very important to see that Europe is investing in the great brains and at the same time it's also very important to see that we have in Europe this technological and this edge with our facilities and I will say that the support that we've had from the Union in actually making these facilities accessible 10 European to pan-european scientists has been very important and even more important has been the seed funding that we have received so that the technology development can be done together at various institutions and so it's the the balance of investing in the individual talent the brains and investing into state-of-the-art infrastructures that really sets us apart thank you let's come back to questions in the room yes hello from Netherlands I question about the accretion disk of black holes they all black holes seems to have an accretion disk did you try to have an image of that accretion yes - and how do I see the accretion disk compared to this image is it outside of this horizon or I don't know you correctly said these black holes are not in vacuum they are surrounded by matter and mutton naturally folds and circles around it now in this very image thus the the accretion disk is essentially as my end we're seeing it almost face on and it so it happens that matter that rotates in this in particular in clockwise direction will be pushing towards us it's all of this emission and this is why the bottom line is more bright than the top part because is what is called Doppler beamed it's more intense because of a relativistic effect so you can imagine other ways matter going around in a clockwise in a in a kind of accretion disk the disk is not thin as we normally see in science fiction it's a very thick accretion disk and the simulation that you will find online will get clarified is a bit better would like to add here that it is okay you know this image can have different interpretation and it is possible that we are actually that this ring is actually the inner edge of the accretion disk or the inner edge of the jet that's where it starts the problem that we have is that the light bending actually blends everything together so when you look at low radio frequencies you see the jet as you go to high frequency you get closer and closer to the event horizon that's what we see that's why I went to this high frequency because that's where we actually start engulfing the entire black hole that we where we can resolve the black hole but that's where the innermost region is and then everything gets blend together by light bending so if you look again at the simulations then you get a much better idea of what we think there is the black sea it didn't have a name and in analogy to the other source that we studies Sagittarius a star we just use this short version called m87 star which does mean it's a star but just now the star actually means it's a very exciting source it's a one of the most exciting sources in in m87 so you know an amusing note the the reason why a name which has been associated and proposed for this black hole so will actually have a proper name besides just a number thank you it's a good idea for a contest though yes back here down here push the button and wait until it turns red yeah cool mutters VOD built-in television have you found something which was unexpected or contradicted Einstein's relativity theory unfortunately not you know you know I think it was less you know mind-blowing to see that in the first place had it been completely different from our expectations we would have had to puzzle for like two more years to really you know see it had we done something wrong of course at some point you hope to find something that you did not expect in your simulations but now everything seems to fit perfectly actually amazingly perfect and I should say actually Monica published a short English publish a paper 2016 if you just convolve it to what we observe today it's almost what we see now thank you any further questions in the room yes can you really exclude any possible may be remotely possible alternative explanation so or could it be for instance connected to the area that the weather jet is launched actually no we cannot exclude there are many alternatives to black holes and there are many black holes in other alternative theories of gravity what we are doing right now is excluding some of them for instance wormholes as I know as mentioned we can exclude boson stars which is also a very popular alternative there are alternatives which are more subtle and will require future observations but what we see is consistent with Einsteins and that's the simplest explanation all of other explanation requires some more exotic explanation that would be difficult to explain with astrophysics for instance but are still allowed by the theory one little edition we ran our simulations actually all kinds of physical scenario so we had actually dis dominated Jet dominators emission would come from all over the place and turned out it almost always looked the same because of the light bending that is a dominating effect so you know we simulated all of that and you know you know whatever wherever it comes from the gr winds and sort of makes that shadow that was actually the predictions and seemed to work out very nicely you will take another question from social media are there any other galaxies that we know of where we might be able to observe black holes yes they are and they are in our list I mean these galaxies and say terraces that are very strong as long as we develop our telescopes to go to bigger collecting surfaces which make us more sensitive to the photons coming from the universe we will tick our list and check for the next ones if you want to resolve the black hole you have to go to a higher resolution and you need telescope larger than the earth and that you can only do from space and so watch for some papers in the next couple of weeks or so which will describe how you could do this do we have any final questions yes the gentleman back there you have a microphone and Julian or just a European citizen astonished by what you have achieved my congratulations I simply wanted to ask you did some simulations to give you some expectation of what you would be looking for in your results according to the parameters of your modeling did he give you any insight into the other parameters of the black hole such as its magnetic field or its angular momentum did it shed any light on the generation of the Jets yes thank you for your question citizen [Laughter] that's very very important rotation of the black hole is very difficult quantity to measure and because of this blending of the light coming out of from the jet or the accretion disk it's very difficult for us and and this is something we discussed in the papers to measure exactly how rapidly the black hole is spinning but we think it is spinning because otherwise it will not make sense in terms of the energetics of the jet and so we think it's spinning and actually if you want to ask well what is the spinning direction we think it's pointing away from us that's our best guess at the moment and learning about magnetic fields that's something that we are working on but right now we don't have a conclusive answer yet again these are much higher much more difficult quantities to measure and we hope with with the future observation to nail down also this information I would like to add here that at the moment we have a sense of rotation so this is something that I mentioned that it is clockwise on the sky so this is something that we are we are certain about I may add on the magnetic fields that these data have still treasures waiting for us we have obtained the total intensity images but we are working also in the polarized light which is also in the data and when we learn about the polarized light we also learn about the magnetic fields this is one of the next things in our to-do list thank you we will be closing this press conference shortly before I invite Commission and with us to formally and officially close the press conference let me of course thank our speakers here and all of you for being here today I would also like to thank our interpreters and technicians because it's not every day that they have to in translate such a scientific language and also put up all this show our scientists will actually be with us till afterwards so if journalists belatedly think of any questions they're welcome to approach them and with that Commissioner the floor is yours for the closing remarks just a word of thanks a word of thanks to everyone for this amazing moment but the word of thanks for the courage because you know is not easy for the scientists to take the risk I mean we were taking a risk of being here today and that is something that is important for Europe that you take the risk to be here you take the risk to be in this moment and to show to people the importance of science and more important to that is that you made us dream today and an important moment you know he goes through difficult times a lot of crises a lot of problems and sometimes we need these moments and this morning when I was reading a speech from Stephen Hawking that he delivered in Chile quite a long ago I thought that I would finish with a quote from him that would inspire us to be hopeful about the future and will inspire the leaders and the prime ministers and the presidents that are here today in Brussels he said the following black holes and has black as they are painted they are not eternal prisons as we thought things can get out of a black hole both to the outside and possibly to another universe so if you feel you are in a black hole don't give up there is always a way out thank you all let me also invite you to join us outside for those who are physically present here today for the exhibition that we have on the project and with this we conclude the press conference thank you

Channel: European Commission

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Keywords: Eutube, European, Commission, Brussels, Buzz, video, discovery, breakthrough, science, press conference, conference, astronomy, universe, discoveries in life, space, black hole, black holes, supermassive black hole, what is a black hole, black hole in space, black holes in space, what are black holes, what's inside a black hole, what is inside a black hole

Id: Dr20f19czeE

Length: 52min 37sec (3157 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2019

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11pm for those watching from Sydney, Australia like me.

[u/kcgg123]

At 15:00 CEST (Brussels Time) in 6 hours. Edit : live now.

[u/JmGt2442]

I'm so pumped up, its one of the greatest discoveries of our history, I think.

[u/Machismo01]

6.5 billion solar masses he said.

Galaxy is roughly 700 billion.

The black hole is roughly 1% of the galaxy's total mass!!!!

Also 100 billion kilometers across is roughly 668 AU! JESUS! This is more than 13 times the maximum orbital distance of Pluto.

[u/CivisMiles]

9am East coast and 6am Pacific Coast Time for those in the Lower 48 States

[u/J-IP]

I was here sharing this moment with millions of people across the world.

​

Whenever people say they liven in another era experiencing X or Y I remember these things I've had a chance to be apart of. When people think that progress isn't made or is slow. Both the good or bad.

​

I remember watching 9/11 live on the news. The 2004 Tsunami. The immense rise of the internet over these decades as well as video gaming, smart phones and a whole slew of tech. The Fukushima disaster and watching that horror unfold from half a world away. The rise of private space companies. The landings of reusable boosters.

The hunt for the higgs boson.

The launch of falcon heavy.

The first image of a black hole.

​

Some events are horrible, others play out slowly and others feel like truly historical moments. But they all make you feel connected to others and shows in what an age we actually are living in.

[u/NinjaSwag_]

15:00 for those of us watching from Sweden era jävlar

[u/VirtualMountain]

Crap, we're due to leave the EU 5 minutes before!

[u/Lampmonster]

Normally have to go to adult sites for this sort of thing.