The iconic image is none short of a science fiction made real as this has been a favourite topic among physicists to wander what happens around the ‘event horizon’, a point of no return where materials disappear forever. This glimpse of a black hole draws a dramatic conclusion to a decade long effort to get a clue on the topic.
It was a capture of a black hole around 500 million trillion km away (or 53 million light years) from the earth, situated in the galaxy named M87. The supermassive black hole measures 40 billion km across, tremendous three million times the size of our earth, and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the mighty sun. No wonder scientists have described it as ‘monster’, and think it to be one of the heaviest known black hole till date.
Credits: NASA/CXC/Villanova University/J. Neilsen
What is a black hole?
1- A black hole is a massive region of space, from which even light can’t escape.
2- Despite being called hole, they consist of a huge amount of matter. Their extraordinary dense nature gives them an immense gravitational pull.
3- These objects are often called ‘singularity’ and the singularity is often surrounded by a sphere named ‘event horizon’. That region of space is actually a ‘point of no return’ as beyond that nothing can ever make a come back.
This monumental achievement was made possible thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope (E.H.T) which is actually network of eight linked telescopes scattered around the world. Interestingly, the image data was collected back in 2017 and after that it took 2 years to piece the data together. On wednesday the director of EHT, Shep Doeleman, said “We are delighted to report to you today that we have seen what we thought was unseeable.”
The idea of the project first came to the mind of Prof Heino Falcke in the year 1993 when he was working as a PhD student. The project was seemingly impossible at that time but after arguing his case for 20 years. It was suddenly made possible as the European Research Council was willing to fund the project. Then, the National Science Foundation and few agencies in East Asia were on board with the idea and they together gave funds more than £40m.
Illustration Credit- NASA/CXC/M.Weiss
The future is exciting as the astronomers are telling to keep an eye for the repeat images of the M87 and many other galaxies black holes. These upcoming pictures will provide important information to know better the mysterious universe, most notably we are likely to get an answer whether the black holes do or don’t change with time?
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