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TOPSHOT - A woman walks on a bridge during the fires in Renaico, Araucania region, Chile on February 4, 2023. - At least 23 people have died in hundreds of forest fires whipped up amid a blistering heat wave in south central Chile, a senior government official said Saturday night. (Photo by JAVIER TORRES / AFP) (Photo by JAVIER TORRES/AFP via Getty Images)

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Don't Miss: Explore wildfire's power at Science Gallery London

New Scientist's weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

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The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) ??? a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration ??? was designed to capture images of a black hole. In coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the centre of Messier 87 and its shadow. The shadow of a black hole seen here is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole???s boundary ??? the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name ??? is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across. While this may sound large, this ring is only about 40 microarcseconds across ??? equivalent to measuring the length of a credit card on the surface of the Moon. Although the telescopes making up the EHT are not physically connected, they are able to synchronize their recorded data with atomic clocks ??? hydrogen masers ??? which precisely time their observations. These observations were collected at a wavelength of 1.3 mm during a 2017 global campaign. Each telescope of the EHT produced enormous amounts of data ??? roughly 350 terabytes per day ??? which was stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives. These data were flown to highly specialised supercomputers ??? known as correlators ??? at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory to be combined. They were then painstakingly converted into an image using novel computational tools developed by the collaboration.

Humans

Don’t Miss: Learning about how the first black hole image was taken

Culture

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Humans

Don't Miss: Marvel's Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Culture

Springtime on Mars: Hubble's Best View of the Red Planet

Space

The First City on Mars review: How to make life on Mars a reality

Culture

Uncertain young woman standing on the street at night. This is entirely 3D generated image.

Humans

Arch-Conspirator review: Ancient Greek tragedy spun into sci-fi gold

Culture

Don’t Miss: Innervate, an EP reflecting on epilepsy by Liza Bec

Humans

Don’t Miss: Innervate, an EP reflecting on epilepsy by Liza Bec

Culture

Interracial heterosexual couple holding hands at home. Millennial young love between two different races; Shutterstock ID 1493320925; purchase_order: -; job: -; client: -; other: -

Humans

Impulse review: An authoritative, if dry, sexual behaviours manual

Culture

2A7XK59 Lisbon, Portugal. 4th Nov, 2019. Edward Snowden, former intelligence officer who served the CIA, NSA, and DIA for nearly a decade as a subject matter expert on technology and cyber security, speaks from Russia to the audience for an interview by James Ball, during the annual Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon. Credit: Henrique Casinhas/SOPA Images/ZUMA Wire/Alamy Live News

Technology

Pegasus review: Terrifying exposé of the world's most powerful spyware

Culture

Starship full stack

Space

Original Sin review: Was space flight tainted from the get-go?

Culture

Star Wars: The Bad Batch

Humans

Don’t Miss: Star Wars animation The Bad Batch is back with a vengeance

New Scientist's weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

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Physics

Collision review: How CERN's stellar secrets became sci-fi gold

Culture

Humans

Don’t Miss: A groundbreaking book on the evolution of meaning in life

Culture

Humans

Why We Meditate review: A convincing argument for regular meditation

Culture

Earth

How a planet became a character in my new novel

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