Black Holes: Ominous, dark, powerful. In a word: black. Up until now, scientists haven’t been able to really picture much more than that. However, for the first time in history, we now have an actual photo of what black holes look like. Thanks to more than a decade’s worth of hard work, researchers working on the Event Horizon Telescope project have been able to capture a picture of a black hole in the Messier 87 or M87 galaxy.
This feat is such an accomplishment because black holes, which are regions of space that have gravitational fields so intense that no radiation or matter can escape, by definition should have been impossible to capture. NASA states this is the exact reason why it’s never been photographed before.
However, since the Event Horizon Telescope project utilized multiple different radio telescopes placed at various locations around the world, a method called “very-long-baseline interferometry” or VLBI for short, scientists were able to combine the data collected from them to get one very high-resolution image.
The picture shows us what is called the “event horizon,” which means the point just after no matter can escape the hole. During this time, there is an intensely bright halo of light that becomes sucked inside by the hole’s powerful gravitational pull.
The black hole is 6.5 billion times bigger than the sun and is surrounded by a ring formed as light that bends in the intense surrounding gravity. It is near what is called the Virgo galaxy cluster approximately 55 million light-years away from Earth.
Sheperd Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, a collection of more than 200 researchers, states, “We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole.” We are looking forward to seeing the advancements that this accomplishment brings to the future of astronomy and congratulate the scientists involved in the labor of this immense task.
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