You Are Looking At 1st Black Hole Pic Ever Captured, And It's Truly A Historic Moment For Us!
The first image of a black hole has been captured thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope spread across the earth. The super massive black hole is thirty lakh times larger than the earth and situated 500 million trillion km away. It took the joint efforts of over 200 scientists mathematicians astronomers and physicists from all over the world to capture the impossible.
The impossible has been achieved, as humanity has captured the very first image of a black hole, thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope spread across the earth.
The super massive black hole is thirty lakh times larger than the earth and situated 500 million trillion km away. This is what it looks like:
EHT
In a press conference held in Brussels, scientists and astronomers from the Event Horizon Telescope revealed the picture of the black hole, and capturing it was no easy task.
What looks like a bright orange "ring of fire" is actually a circling mass of superheated gas falling into the black hole. The light escaping from the halo is immeasurably bright, brighter than all the stars in our galaxy combined. And at the center is of course the event horizon, where all light goes to die, falling inescapably to what end we don't yet know.
The black hole image is a composite made from data gathered by eight radio telescopes spread across the entire planet. It captures the event horizon of a black hole.
The black hole is described as "a monster" by researchers, situated 500 million trillion km away from earth, and measuring 3 million times the size of our planet. Yeah, it's huge!
How was this image created? A giant global network of radio/millimeter-wave telescopes joined together to create a virtual PLANET-SIZED telescope. The image is patched together from the data from all of these. #EHT #BlackHole (image: Akiyama et al and ApJL) pic.twitter.com/FyfeC8BTqP
¡ª Katie Mack (@AstroKatie) April 10, 2019
The super massive black hole is 6.5 billion times the mass of our Sun. If you're wondering how scientists revealed the historic moment, take a look at the video embedded below:
This was the moment the first image of a black hole was announced at the press conference in Brussels #blackhole #EHTblackhole #RealBlackHole #M87 pic.twitter.com/fuVXv1Pztp
¡ª Nature News & Comment (@NatureNews) April 10, 2019
It took the joint efforts of over 200 scientists, mathematicians, astronomers and physicists from all over the world to capture the impossible -- the first ever picture of a black hole.
Congratulations to the 200 plus engineers & astronomers that brought this about! #blackhole #EHTblackhole #RealBlackHole #M87 pic.twitter.com/0XELMi2bed
¡ª Joy Crane (@JoyCrane1) April 10, 2019
The black hole, as one Twitter present at the press conference pointed out, truly is beautiful. Not to mention mesmerizing.
beautiful#blackhole #EHT#RealBlackHole #eventhorizon #blackholeday pic.twitter.com/m3uHIGipAH
¡ª Usama Kenway (@UsamaKenway) April 10, 2019
Some people were quick to point out how the black hole looked a lot like Medu Vada -- a South Indian snack. And make fun and light of the historic moment.
First ever direct image of a #BlackHole!
¡ª akash (@akash_d21) April 10, 2019
Supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87 -- 6.5 billion times as massive as the Sun... Woah
Clicked by Iphone X pic.twitter.com/FLeDeq65Tm
Damn, two #BlackHole disvorverd on the same day! ? pic.twitter.com/mxSBkeZ8XY
¡ª FennekFox (@TheFennekFox) April 10, 2019
And lastly, there was a beautiful tribute to Einstein and Hawking -- the giants on whose shoulders a lot of research around black hole revolves.
Don't worry, Masters. Even if you were wrong, we will discover something new. #BlackHole pic.twitter.com/5N6YVBGapH
¡ª ?HongKong? (@Tomkanth) April 10, 2019
Let's hope the image of this black hole -- the clearest image ever captured -- expands our horizon and understanding of black holes and other mysteries of the universe.
