Astronomers have taken the first photo of a black hole or black hole and released details of the historic event in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, Wednesday (1 UW201 9).
According to details from astronomers, the black hole that was successfully photographed by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) or network of 8 telescopes around the world is located in a galaxy that is 500 million trillion km away from Earth. While the extent is estimated at 40 billion km – three million times the size of the earth – and has been described by scientists as a “monster” that resembles Sauron’s eyes in the blazing “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.
Quoted by BBC News, Prof. Heino Falcke from Radboud University in the Netherlands, who proposed an attempt to take photos of black holes, said that the black hole was found in a galaxy called M87.
“What we see is bigger than the size of our entire Solar System. It has a mass of 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. And that is one of the toughest black holes that we think is. This hole is an absolute monster, the heavyweight champion of the black hole in the Universe. Until now we still have to try to understand how black holes can be created, “Falcke was quoted as saying by BBC News, Wednesday (1Uf4f2019).
Falcke further explained that the black hole photograph showed a very bright“ring of fire” surrounding a perfectly circular dark hole. The ring of fire at the edge of the center of the dark circle is the result of the presence of hot gas drawn by large gravity to enter the black hole. The light of the ring of fire is brighter than the combined billions of other stars in the galaxy and that is what makes it visible even from great distances. Astronomers suspect that the MB? Galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its core from the color photos they see. The dark center is actually not just a black hole but is a dense and fast moving star.
Dr Ziri Younsi from University College London, who also participated in the EHT collaboration, said the existence of black hole photos has proven and confirmed Einstein’s theory.“Although they are relatively simple objects, black holes raise some of the most complex questions about the nature of space and time, and ultimately our existence. It is truly remarkable that the photos we observe are very similar to what we get from our theoretical calculations. So far, it looks like Einstein is right once again, “said Younsi, Wednesday (1 O»‘4r’2019).
The first photo of a black hole will allow researchers to learn more about the mysterious objects of the universe. They will be interested in finding ways in which black holes deviate from what is expected in physics. No one really knows how the bright ring around the hole was created. Even more interesting is the question of what happens when an object falls into the black hole.
A black hole is a region of space in which nothing, not even light, can escape.
Although called a hole, the circle is not empty and consists of a large amount of material packed densely into a small area, giving a very large gravitational pull that does not allow any object of light to escape or escape its gravitational effect called the “point of no return“.
Prof. Falcke came up with an idea for a black hole photo shoot project when he was a PhD student in 1993. At that time nobody thought his project could be carried out. But Falcke was the first to realize that certain types of radio emissions produced near and around a black hole would be strong enough to be detected by telescopes on Earth. Apart from that from a 1973 scientific paper he had read, Falcke knew that because of the enormous gravity, black holes appear 2.5 times bigger than they really are. It is these two factors that make Falcke believe what seems impossible can become possible.
After debating his case for 20 years, Prof. Falcke succeeded in persuading the European Research Council to fund his project. Eventually the National Science Foundation and agents in East Asia also joined forces to finance projects that cost more than £ 40 million. Therefore, the publication of black hole photos according to Prof. Falcke is not only to show that “his mission is accomplished“ but also to show that large investments for his project are not in vain.
There is no single telescope that is strong enough to photograph black holes. So, in the biggest experiment of its kind, Prof. Shepard Doeleman of Harvard- Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is leading a project to build a network of eight interconnected telescopes. Together, they form the Event Horizon Telescope and can be considered an array of planet-sized dishes. Each telescope is placed at the height of various exotic sites, including volcanoes in Hawaii and Mexico, mountains in Arizona and Sierra Nevada in Spain, in the Chilean Atacama Desert, and in Antarctica.
Information collected by a team of 200 scientists from directing the network telescope towards M8? and scanning its heart for 10 days is too much to send over the internet. Instead, data is stored on hundreds of hard drives that are flown to central processing centers in Boston, USA, and Bonn, Germany, as centers for information gathering. Prof. Doeleman described the achievement as “extraordinary scientific achievement”.
“We have achieved something that was considered impossible by the previous generation. Breakthroughs in technology, connections between the best radio observatories in the world, and innovative algorithms have all come together to open an entirely new window about black holes, “Doeleman said, Wednesday (10r4r2019).
Doeleman also said that his team also managed to scan and image the existence of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. But even though it might sound strange, his team had more difficulty in photographing black holes in galaxies that were only 55 million light away. This is due to some unknown reasons, the “ring of fire” around the black hole in the heart of the Milky Way is smaller and fainter and rotates faster and more massive.
