Teachable Moment: How Scientists Captured the First Image of a Black Hole

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Title: Teachable Moment – How Scientists Captured the First Image of a Black Hole

Teachable Moment - How Scientists Captured the First Image of a Black Hole

Accomplishing what was previously thought to be impossible, a team of international astronomers has captured the first image of a black hole's silhouette. Though astronomers had theorized they could image black holes by capturing their silhouettes against their glowing surroundings, the ability to image an object so distant eluded them until the Event Horizon Telescope team took on the challenge – working well over a decade to achieve the feat.

In the latest Teachable Moment from NASA/JPL Edu, education specialist Ota Lutz explains how the team managed to build a virtual telescope as large as Earth itself to capture an image of the supermassive black hole 53 million light-years away. Find out how to share the science behind the achievement with students while teaching them about gravity and the dynamic nature of our universe, and sharpening their math skills.

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Related Lessons and Activities

Use these standards-aligned lessons and related activities to capture your students’ enthusiasm about black holes.

	Problem Set: Black Hole Math (Grades 6-12) – Students can sharpen their math skills all while learning about black holes with these standards-aligned math problems.
	Lesson: Dropping In With Gravitational Waves (Grades 6-8) – Students develop a model to represent gravitational waves and their propagation through spacetime.
	Lesson: How Do We See Dark Matter? (Grades 6-12) – Students will make observations of two containers and identify differences in content, justify their claims and make comparisons to dark matter observations.
	Teachable Moment: Modeling Gravitational Waves – Find out how researchers proved part of Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, then create a model of the Nobel Prize-winning experiment in the classroom.
	Video: What Is a Black Hole? – Find out how what a black hole is, how they can form and why they are so cool!
	Slideshow: Black Holes By the Numbers – What are black holes and how do they form?