Astronomers have captured the first-ever image of a black hole using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) – a network of eight radio telescopes spanning the globe at various locations including Antarctica, Spain and Chile – which creates an effective telescope the size of the earth.
The results were presented simultaneously by teams in Tokyo, Washington, Brussels, and Santiago de Chile.
“This major discovery provides visual evidence for the existence of black holes and pushes the boundaries of modern science,” said the European Commission in Brussels in a Wednesday statement.
The image shows a halo of dust and gas steadily “feeding” the black hole’s fuzzy doughnut-shaped accretion disc, according to The Guardian. The colossal black hole is located at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster 55-million light-years from Earth.
We are “looking at a region we cannot imagine, the gates of hell, the point of no-return,” said Heino Falcke – Professor of Astroparticle Physics and Radio Astronomy at Radbound University Nijmegen and chair of the EHT Science Council. “To me, it’s awe-inspiring, but it’s also important for physics.”
At the event horizon, light is bent in a perfect loop around the black hole, meaning if you stood there you would be able to see the back of your own head. The observations also provide one of the most stringent tests to date of Einstein’s theory of general relativity: this predicts a rounded shape of the black hole’s halo, in line with what EHT has observed. –The Guardian
Scientists say they observed the source for four days and “the size is always the same, it doesn’t change and we measured the contrast between the ring itself and the central darkness,” Astrophysicist Monika Moscibrodzka from Radboud University Nijmegen said. “This kind of structure can only be formed if something is rotating — could be matter around it or black hole itself. Images give sense of direction of rotation, which is clockwise. We are looking at the shadow of the black hole.” –Bloomberg
“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,” said Falcke. “This shadow, caused by the gravitational bending and capture of light by the event horizon, reveals a lot about the nature of these fascinating objects and allowed us to measure the enormous mass of M87’s black hole.”
“Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe. We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have taken a picture of a black hole,” said EHT director and Harvard University senior research fellow, Sheperd Doeleman – who led the project involving more than 200 scientists.
The EHT network detects radiation emitted by pa