Unveiling the Cosmic Mystery: First Image of a Black Hole
Paragraph 1
It does not get any bigger than this in science. Compact massive objects in space with giant gravitational muscles that can even make light bend — black holes — that were, till the other day a mathematical artefact and ‘visible’ only in artists’ impressions, became, a real photograph. Technically, the photo that was unveiled is of, as Dan Robitzski put it in Futurism.com, the “stuff behind [the black hole] that’s been warped all the way around by an immense gravitational force.” It is the first direct image of a supermassive black hole at the centre of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the Virgo galaxy cluster about 55 light years away from Earth.
Paragraph 2
The image that the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) conglomerate presented was a fiery reddish yellow doughnut. The silhouette of the black hole is illuminated by material entering its event horizon — the boundary of the black hole beyond which nothing can escape its gravitational pull. Despite indirect observations and confirmations, photographing black holes had eluded scientists. It’s like reading the writing on a tea cup on Jupiter from Earth. EHT is a network of eight different dishes — in Hawaii, Mexico, Arizona, Spanish Sierra Nevada, the Chilean Atacama Desert and Antarctica. This array was used to photograph the M87 black hole whose mass is 6.5 billion times that of the Sun.
Paragraph 3
According to the EHT scientists, “the shadow of a black hole is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s event horizon — from which EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across”. What the photograph confirms is that Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity (GTR) is correct, even in extreme places such as the event horizon. Einstein defined gravity as distortions of space-time. GTR equations reveal that if a highly dense compact massive object can hide behind the event horizon beyond which the force of gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape, the black hole will distort the space around it. The M87 black hole photo is, therefore, yet another experimental proof of Einstein’s genius.
Paragraph 4
The significance of this discovery is that the astronomers can now begin to understand these strange structures better. There are several significant theoretical observations and results waiting to be ‘verified’ experimentally. In EHT, astronomers have tools to put the theory to test. From Einstein, John Wheeler to Stephen Hawking, many theoretical physicists have made significant contributions to build the black hole lore. Scientists and the science-minded would be eager to know how much of it is ‘true’.
