News.hust.edu.cn (Correspondent: Liu Huan) At 21:00 Beijing time on April 10, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences released the first pictures of black holes acquired by humans. The released images revealed the black hole at the center of the supermassive galaxy M87 in the Virgo cluster, 55 million light-years away from earth and 6.5 billion times than the mass of the sun. As a member of EHT's China team, professor Wu Qingwen from the school of physics, together with his Dr. Feng Jianchao, participated in the theoretical analysis work.

Wu Qingwen said that in the past few years, the research group carried out a series of studies, made good definition in the black hole swallowing process, black hole spin and other important information, and put forward the black hole image observed by the EHT should be from the matters swallowed by black hole, rather than the relativistic jet. They also found that the supermassive black hole was likely spinning at high speed. This picture of a black hole supported these findings.

In addition, China's scientific community not only participated in the EHT project, but also led the Tianqin Space Gravitational Wave Detector Project in China. The Project, proposed by academician Luo Jun of the school of physics was to deploy three satellites orbiting the earth to form a space gravitational wave detector. This will help us understand important astronomical and physical issues such as seed black holes in the early universe, the growth history of black holes and the evolution of galaxies. In particular, a large number of intermediate-mass black holes may be searched, which will play a key role in greening black hole deserts.

It was learned that professor Wu Qingwen was introduced as talent by the school of physics of our university in June 2010. Before that, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in Kyoto University of Japan and Institute of Astronomy and Space Science of Korea. He was elected to the "New Century Excellent Talents Program" of the Ministry of Education in 2013 and funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China in 2016. He is currently a member of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a member of the Chinese Astronomical Society, vice president of the Hubei Astronomical Society, and a member of the Steering Committee for the Teaching of Astronomy in Universities and Colleges under the Ministry of Education.