第一张黑洞图片背后的团队，刚刚获得了300万美元的奖金

The heart of every major galaxy is thought to contain a supermassive black hole – a place where gravity is so strong that anything, including light, gets devoured.

我们都知道，每个主要星系的中心包含着一个超大质量黑洞——一个引力非常强大的地方，包括光在内的任何东西都会被吞噬。

Like all black holes, supermassive ones form when stars collapse in on themselves at the end of their life cycles. On average, they're millions of timesmore massive than the Sun.

和所有黑洞一样，超大质量黑洞是恒星在生命周期结束时自我坍塌而形成的。平均来说，它们的质量是太阳的数百万倍。

For years, scientists have struggled to capture a black hole on camera, since the absence of light renders them nearly impossible to see.

多年来，科学家们一直在努力用相机捕捉黑洞，因为没有光线，黑洞几乎看不见。

But on April 10, a group of scientists from the international Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration released the first-ever photograph of a supermassive black hole to the public. Though the image was fuzzy, it signified a major milestone for space research.

但在4月10日，国际事件地平线望远镜合作组织的一组科学家，向公众公布了有史以来第一张超大质量黑洞的照片。虽然这幅图像很模糊，但它标志着太空研究的一个重要里程碑。

The accomplishment has now earned the team a 2020 Breakthrough Prize, which was awarded on September 5. The prize was started eight years ago by a team of investors including Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg, and is often referred to as the "Oscars of Science".

这一成就现在为该队赢得了9月5日颁发的2020年突破奖。这个奖项是由一个包括谢尔盖·布林和马克·扎克伯格在内的投资者团队八年前创立的，被称为“科学界的奥斯卡”。

The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (EHT) team will collectively receive US$3 million, but the money will be divided equally among the group's 347 scientists, giving each person around US$8,600.

活动地平线望远镜合作(eht)小组将总共获得300万美元，但这笔钱将平均分配给该小组的347名科学家，每人约8600美元。

获奖照片(Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration)

What the black hole photograph shows

这张黑洞照片显示了什么

The April image captured a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Messier 87 galaxy, which is about 54 million light-years away from Earth. The black hole in the photo likely had a mass equivalent to 6.5 billion Suns.

这张四月的照片，拍摄到了梅西埃87星系中心的一个超大质量黑洞，距离地球约5400万光年。照片中的黑洞质量可能相当于65亿个太阳。

Black holes are defined by a border called the event horizon: a region of space so dense with matter that not even light can escape its gravity. This creates a circular 'shadow', where all light and matter is gobbled up.

黑洞是由一个叫做视界的边界来定义的:这个空间区域的物质密度如此之大，以至于光都无法逃脱它的引力。这就产生了一个圆形的“阴影”，所有的光和物质都被吞噬。

Outside the event horizon, supermassive black holes have an accretion disk – clouds of hot gas and dust trapped in orbit. Though scientists can't see beyond a black hole's event horizon, they can detect the gas and dust in that disk, since the material gives off radio waves that can be captured by a high-powered telescope.

在事件视界之外，超大质量黑洞有一个吸积盘——由热气体和尘埃组成的云被困在轨道上。尽管科学家们无法从黑洞的视界之外看到，但他们可以探测到圆盘中的气体和尘埃，因为这些物质会发出无线电波，可以被高功率望远镜捕捉到。

This is what EHT scientists captured in their groundbreaking image.

这是EHT的科学家们在他们开创性的图像中捕捉到的。

"As a cloud of gas gets closer to the black hole, they speed up and heat up," Josephine Peters, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, told Business Insider in October.

牛津大学天体物理学家约瑟芬·彼得斯(Josephine Peters)今年10月对《商业内幕》(Business Insider)表示：“随着一团气体离黑洞越来越近，它们会加速并升温。”

"It glows brighter the faster and hotter it gets. Eventually, the gas cloud gets close enough that the pull of the black hole stretches it into a thin arc."

“它发出的光越快越亮，温度越高。最终，气体云靠得足够近，黑洞的引力把它拉伸成一个细细的弧形。”

黑洞的主要特征。(ESO/ESA/Hubble/M. Kornmesser/Business Insider)

To capture the image, researchers relied on 8 telescopes

为了拍摄这幅图像，研究人员依靠8架望远镜

The EHT scientists are stationed all over the world, at 60 institutions across 20 countries.

EHT科学家分布在世界各地，在20个国家的60个机构。

To capture the photograph, they relied on eight radio telescopes, operating in Antarctica, Chile, Mexico, Hawaii, Arizona, and Spain. They used a network of atomic clocks – extremely precise time-keeping devices that can measure billionths of a second – to sync up the telescopes around the world.

为了拍摄这张照片，他们使用了8台射电望远镜，分别在南极洲、智利、墨西哥、夏威夷、亚利桑那和西班牙运行。他们使用了一个原子钟网络——可以测量十亿分之一秒的极其精确的计时设备——来同步世界各地的望远镜。

The EHT project began collecting information about black holes in 2006.

EHT项目从2006年开始收集有关黑洞的信息。

The image released in April was the result of observations that started two years prior.

今年4月公布的这张照片是两年前开始的观测结果。

(Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration)

"It feels like looking at the gates of hell, at the end of space and time," Heino Falcke, an Event Horizon Telescope collaborator, said when the photo was published in April.

“感觉就像是在看地狱之门，在空间和时间的尽头。”事件地平线望远镜合作者海诺·法尔克(Heino Falcke)在4月份发表这张照片时说。

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

本文最初由Business Insider发表。