The First ever image of a Black Hole

Praise Albert Einstein

This is the first-ever image of a black hole.

The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope

This was released by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration on April 10th 2019.

Everyone would be aware of it by now.

• You might be thinking how did the scientists manage to take a picture of a black hole?
• And why is it not looking like the black hole which was shown in the Interstellar movie?
• And what can we understand from this image?

The black hole is in the center of the galaxy named M87.
The black is very active, meaning it’s constantly feeding of from matter in an accretion disk (A region surrounding the black hole where the other matters revolve in stable orbits)

So why is the image so fuzzy??
It’s because it’s so tiny. The black hole is itself supermassive in fact, but from this picture, the black hole has a mass of 6.5 billion times that of our sun!
The size of its shadow is the size of our solar system and the main reason is, its located 53 million light years away.

So to take a picture of something that small, and to get this sort of resolution by the laws of physics we needed a telescope the size of the earth.

So 200 scientists from EHT used 8 telescopes spread across the globe. (Antartica, Spain, Chile, Mexico, Hawai, Sierra Nevada, Chilean Atacama Desert, Arizona)

They observed the M87 and as the earth rotates they fill in the earth sized telescope that they were trying to simulate!

Souce: EHT

The reconstruction algorithm was done by Katie Bouman (a postdoctoral fellow on the Event Horizon Telescope Imaging team)

I recommend you to watch her TED talk.

It’s amazing to see these scientists do extreme things which seemed impossible and yet they achieved it.

The general theory of relativity published over 100 years ago is supported and proved right.

For now, the striking image of the black hole in M87 confirms Albert Einstein was right and black holes exist.

Thanks for all the support and I feel privileged to be able to understand and share the beauty of nature and science!

See you next time

SS

Thanks for reading.

Until next time

Peace, Love and Gratitude.