Baidu Celebrates Black Hole Image With Cheery Doodle

Monster black hole revealed for the first time

The results of the years-long effort have been published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. The black hole is located in a distant galaxy is 40 billion km across, about - million times the size of the Earth. Scientists working on the project describe it as "a monster." The eight linked telescopes managed to capture the phenomenon despite it being 500 million trillion km away.

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The image which is being shared across the world shows an intensely bright ring surrounding an ominous circular black hole. The ‘ring of fire’ is created by superheated gas falling into the hole.

Supermassive

To put just how bright that ring is into perspective, scientists estimate it is brighter than all the billions of other stars in the galaxy combined. This hard-to-fathom intensity allows it to be seen from Earth.

Observe the edge of the dark circle carefully, that is where the gas enters the black hole. An object with such an intense gravitational pull that not even light can escape. The incredibly difficult imaging task was accomplished by a huge collaborative effort of international scientist and researchers.

They used a technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), which was essentially a network of radio telescopes around the world which coordinated their efforts to produce a series of images from different vantage points. Then a supercomputer spent two years stitching together the more than one million gigabytes of data captured by the telescopes to create the image we see today.

Baidu beats Google

Baidu seems to have beaten Google to be the first to celebrate the incredible scientific breakthrough. Known as ‘doodles’ both search engines often change their logo above the search bar to commemorate extraordinary events, anniversaries and people.

Baidu has the 2nd largest search engine in the world, but like Google don't limit their operations to the web. The company’s Apollo Project is one of the world's leading autonomous driving and AI programs. It has an extended partner ecosystem that includes over 100 global partners as of 2018, including BYD, Dongfeng, Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia, Daimler AG,[10] ZTE, Grab, Ford, Hyundai, and Honda.