The image of a black hole captured by the Event Horizon Telescope. Photograph: EHT Collaboration
Researchers around the world have managed to document a huge black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy. “We saw what we thought we could not see,” one researcher said.
This is how a black hole, one of the mysterious things in the universe, appeared: for the first time, researchers were able to photograph a black hole. This is the giant black guy at the center of the M87 galaxy, located about 55 million light-years away.
The picture was taken in collaboration with researchers around the world in the Event Horizon Telescope project. The picture was presented Wednesday afternoon at press conferences held in parallel in Washington, Brussels, Tokyo, Shanghai, Taipei and Santiago.
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The picture, which shows a ring shape in yellow, orange and black, was taken by six telescopes positioned at different locations on Earth. “We saw what we thought we could not see, we saw and took a picture of a black hole, here it is,” declared Sheppard Dollman of Harvard University.
Jessica Dempsey, deputy director of the Observatory in Hawaii, said that when she saw the picture, she remembered Sauron’s eye from the Lord of the Rings.
The picture itself, according to the scientists, was taken for four days when weather conditions in all places where the telescopes were placed were “perfect”. The researchers said the picture helps confirm Einstein’s general theory of relativity, published about 100 years ago. At the Washington press conference, the researchers said it was a picture showing how the black hole looked 55 million years ago.
A black hole, in astrophysics, is the final stage in the lives of stars of mass. According to the astrophysical theory of the life cycle of stars, when the nuclear fuel that supplies energy to a star in the fusion process is depleted, gravity causes the star material to collapse into it (until then, the outward radiation pressure offsets the gravitational pull).
Supermassive black holes wake up relatively soon after their galaxies are formed, devouring huge amounts of gas, dust and even stars to reach such a huge size.
Unprecedented resolution
Prof. Ram Sari, an astrophysicist and vice president for research and development at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explained how the researchers managed to photograph the black hole. “In a study whose first results are published today, the researchers have created a new telescope by combining a number of existing telescopes,” he explained. “Telescopes are located in different parts of the Earth, thousands of miles apart, allowing unprecedented resolution.”
Prof. Sari added: “A black hole distorts the pathways of light that passes close to it, and the picture can show this distortion in the pixels around the black hole, which is called the shadow of the black hole. Of the black hole, like its rotation rate around its axis,
Thus shedding light on the way it was created. “
