Scientists Release The First Ever Photo Of A Black Hole

Apr 11, 2019 by apost team

Scientists have released the first ever photo of a black hole at six major news conferences held at the same time all over the world. The groundbreaking scientific event was made possible by an international project called the Event Horizon Telescope. It essentially creates a 'virtual Earth-sized telescope' by bringing together data from dozens of observatories.

The black hole pictured is located 55 million light-years away in the Messier 87 galaxy. Though black holes are tiny in the grand scheme of the universe, this black hole is a little less than 40 billion kilometers wide with a mass 6.5 billion times larger than the Sun, making it one of the largest visible black holes from Earth.

apost.com

The breakthrough was published in an issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, combining the hard work of a team of more than 200 researchers from all over the globe into a series of six papers.

“We have accomplished something many thought impossible by imaging the shadow of a black hole and it provides the strongest evidence to date that such evasive and enigmatic entities do indeed exist. It’s the closest we can get to imaging a black hole, which is an object with such a strong a gravitational field that no light or matter can escape,” said Dr. Ziri Younsi (UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory), according to University College London.

“This observation lays the foundation for future studies of black holes and could play a crucial role in our understanding of the behavior of light and matter in the most extreme environments in our Universe."

"If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowing gas, we expect a black hole to create a dark region similar to a shadow — something predicted by Einstein’s general relativity that we’ve never seen before," according to the chair of the EHT Science Council Professor Heino Falcke (Radboud University, the Netherlands).

However, that's something scientists had never been able to picture until now.

This black hole's shadow is about 2.5 times larger than the shadow it casts. It's surrounded by a glowing ring-like structure, as predicted by theoretical models.

This discovery is expected to advance not only the study of black holes, which are some of the most complex physical phenomenons in the universe, but also the study of space and time itself.

"Although they are relatively simple objects, being wholly characterizable in terms of a few fundamental parameters, black holes raise some of the most complex questions about the nature of space and time, and ultimately of our existence," concluded Dr. Younsi.

What do you think of this scientific discovery? Let us know in the comments and pass this along to your friends and family so they don't miss out on this incredible news!