The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun.
Scientists obtained the image using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. (Image: Twitter/@ehtelescope)
Just a few seconds past 18:30 hours IST, the world witnessed the first ever real image of the Black Hole.
Scientists obtained the image using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87.
The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun.
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You're looking at the first ever image of a black hole. It was captured by the #NSFFunded @ehtelescope project. #ehtblackhole #RealBlackHole https://t.co/6dglvqrvOs pic.twitter.com/0hclANf4tc
— National Science Foundation (@NSF) April 10, 2019
Termed as “Gates of Hell”, the spokesperson said that you cannot photograph a black hole but you can see its shadow, that’s when light disappears behind the Event Horizon.
The Event Horizon Telescope had been designed for this specific purpose of capturing the image of a black hole.
Black hole has long been a subject of human curiosity. While astronomers have been talking about “dark stars” since 1700s, the community eventually speculated that these bright spots were in fact “black holes”, with American physicist John Archibald Wheeler coming out with the term in the mid-1960s.
“More than 50 years ago, scientists saw that there was something very bright at the centre of our galaxy,” AFP quoted Paul McNamara, an astrophysicist at the European Space Agency and an expert on black holes, as saying. He added: “It has a gravitational pull strong enough to make stars orbit around it very quickly — as fast as 20 years.”
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