Earlier today, a team of scientists published in Astrophysical Journal Letters the results of a joint effort to capture the first black hole photo in history. The mysterious object, literally located in a galaxy far far away (called M87), looks portentously back at us like an ominous eye of fire—truly a sight to behold.
Here it is, the one and only image of the black hole:
The black hole measures about 40 billion kilometers across. That’s huge! To give you an idea of its massive size, multiply the size of the Earth three million times—that’s how big it is. Even by galactic standards, this thing’s “a monster,” as described by astronomers.
“What we see is larger than the size of our entire solar system,” said Professor Heino Falcke of Radboud University, the scientist who proposed the project.
But that’s not the most impressive thing about the feat. The black hole is over 500 million trillion kilometers away. Can you imagine the challenges involved in taking the picture of such a distant object? No wonder it took until now.
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What is a black hole?
A black hole is a region (often described as an object) of spacetime where so much matter is condensed in such a proportionally small area that it exhibits an extraordinarily powerful gravity. This means a black hole pulls everything with such force that nothing can escape once it’s within its grasp—not particles, not even light itself.
The point of no return around a black hole, that exact area where you’d be trapped and begin your trip “into” it, is called “the event horizon.” Once you reach that point, the hole’s gravitational effects become so strong that you’d be crushed and your particles would have no way to get out.
Artistic rendition of the black hole Cygnus X-1Since light goes in but doesn’t come out, black holes are just that: black (though not technically “holes,” since they are not actually empty space—quite the contrary, they’re full of matter). And that’s what makes them nearly impossible to see: without light, there’s no vision.
But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel—literally. Before reaching the center of the black hole, superheated gas can spark up all around it. As this gas starts falling into the hole, suddenly it can outline the circumference of the otherwise invisible object—creating a “ring of fire”—and voilá. The black hole reveals itself.
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A simulated Black Hole of ten solar masses as seen from a distance of 600km with the Milky Way in the background. Its powerful gravity bends the light around it. Simulation by Ute Kraus.
What’s so special about this photo?
Scientists faced two main challenges when it came to capturing this momentous picture: the ridiculous distance between us and the hole, and, more importantly, the fact that what they’re photographing is generally invisible.
For starters, no single telescope is powerful enough to capture an image of the black hole. So a team effort of unprecedented proportions was needed, where eight massive telescopes across the world were coordinated in an attempt to do what seemed impossible. And they succeeded.
The telescopes around the world that compose the powerful Event Horizon Telescope.Over 200 scientists worked on the project, led by Prof. Sheperd Doeleman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics. The network comprised of the eight linked telescopes form what has been named as the Event Horizon Telescope, powerful enough to reach across the universe and into the heart of the supergiant elliptical galaxy Messier 87, in the constellation Virgo.
What made it all possible was the special features of this one black hole in particular. The supermassive black hole “has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun,” says Prof. Falcke, “it is one of the heaviest black holes that we think exists. It is an absolute monster, the heavyweight champion of black holes in the Universe.”
Its colossal nature makes the “ring of fire” that surrounds it particularly bright. In fact, the light stemming from this ring is brighter than all the billions of other stars in Messier 87 combined. And that fact alone allows us to see the ring even from Earth.
The galactic core of Messier 87 as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope, with its blue plasma jet clearly visible.A sad space story: The Forgotten Animals That Made Space Travel Possible For Humans
Should you care?
This photograph represents an extraordinary step towards visualizing something that had, until now, remained a mere theoretical abstraction. Imagine spending your whole life blind, studying the world through the rest of your senses. Imagine knowing that something out there exists, suspecting what it looks like, but never having seen it.
Then imagine that, suddenly, you get to witness it with your own eyes. You find all you knew you’d find. All the beauty, all the wonders, all those little details you had spent your life theorizing about—all of it suddenly comes together. You’re redeemed. You knew it all along, but seeing it… that’s just magical. That’s what this photo means to astronomers all around the world.
Photo by CSIRO.The image indeed matches what many thought a black hole would look like. That’s incredible in itself—all the speculation, all the math, all the experiments. Everything has been proven right on the dot. Human ingenuity is nothing short of spectacular.
And as Dr. Ziri Younsi of University College London, who participated in the project, says:
“Although they are relatively simple objects, black holes raise some of the most complex questions about the nature of space and time, and ultimately of our existence.”
This picture will also help researchers to learn more and more about these still deeply mysterious objects. There’s much yet to be discovered about them, and this just got us closer to uncovering their secrets. If anything, it at least showed us that which we have been studying for over a century. Scientists are no longer in the dark—literally.
Photo by: ESO/B. Tafreshi.So, even if you don’t personally care, it’s important to be aware of what this milestone means for our quest to understand the universe we live in—and ourselves in the process.
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