Scientists unveiled the first photo of a black hole on Wednesday. The supermassive black hole is at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, which is 55 million light years away from Earth. It is a culmination of several years of work spanning facilities across the globe. As the photo was taken using an array of radio satellites around the world working together.
Check out the picture shared by Nasa here:
The background image, taken in infrared light, shows the location of our Milky Way’s humongous black hole, called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short. This black hole is 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun. Catching its shadow involved eight ground-based radio telescopes around the globe, operating together as if they were one telescope the size of our entire planet.
As part of this effort, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory space telescope missions, all of them attuned to different varieties of X-ray light, turned their gaze to the M87 black hole around the same time as the EHT in April 2017.
CNET too tweeted,
Paul Hertz, director of the astrophysics division at NASA Headquarters in Washington said, “This is an amazing accomplishment by the EHT team. Years ago, we thought we would have to build a very large space telescope to image a black hole. By getting radio telescopes around the world to work in concert like one instrument, the EHT team achieved this, decades ahead of time.”
A black hole is an extremely dense object from which no light can escape. Anything that comes within a black hole’s “event horizon,” will be consumed, never to re-emerge, because of the black hole’s unimaginably strong gravity. The black hole is never seen but the hot disk of material that encircles it shines brightly. Against the bright backdrop, a black hole appears to cast a shadow.
Truly a historic moment for the scientists involved in the work of capturing a black hole image.
Also Read: NASA detects huge meteor explosion over Russia’s Bering Sea