Astronomers reveal first image of a black hole
AFP|
Eureka! First glimpse of a black hole
And it's as hot, as violent and as beautiful as science fiction imagined.
In pic: The first ever photo a black hole, taken using a global network of telescopes, conducted by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, to gain insight into celestial objects with gravitational fields so strong no mater or light can escape, is shown.
Reuters
How does it look?
The image shows light and gas swirling around the lip of a supermassive black hole, a monster of the universe whose existence was theorised by Einstein more than a century ago but confirmed only indirectly over the decades.
In pic: A black hole image has been captured for the 1st time.
Image Credit: Twitter/Nasa
Others
Where is it situated?
Light gets bent and twisted around by gravity in a bizarre funhouse effect as it gets sucked into the abyss along with superheated gas and dust.
Agencies
Einstein's theory
Three years ago, scientists using an extraordinarily sensitive observing system heard the sound of two much smaller black holes merging to create a gravitational wave, as Einstein predicted. The new image adds light to that sound.
Outside scientists suggested the achievement could be worthy of a Nobel, just like the gravitational wave discovery.
In pic: Using X-ray light bouncing off the disk of matter around a black hole, astronomers have mapped the system in better detail than ever before.
Image Credit: Twitter/Albert Einstein
Others
Myth
The black hole is about 6 billion times the mass of our sun and is in a galaxy called M87. Its "event horizon" — the precipice, or point of no return where light and matter get sucked inexorably into the hole — is as big as our entire solar system.
Black holes are the "most extreme environment in the known universe," Broderick said, a violent, churning place of "gravity run amok." Unlike smaller black holes, which come from collapsed stars, supermassive black holes are mysterious in origin.
Myth says a black hole would rip a person apart, but scientists said that because of the particular forces exerted by an object as big as the one in M87, someone could fall into it and not be torn to pieces. But the person would never be heard from or seen again.
In pic: 3 years ago MIT grad student Katie Bouman led the creation of a new algorithm to produce the first-ever image of a black hole.
Agencies
