Shedding Some Light on Black Holes

    Just under a week ago, astronomers were able to capture an image of a black hole through much analysis and special telescopes. The image is significant in the science community, as it confirms the existence of black holes, which was predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. It took nearly two years of analysis of images of the constellation Virgo to obtain these images. Analysis revealed that this black hole is located inside the galaxy known as Messier 87, which is over 53 million light years from Earth. The black hole is classified as supermassive, meaning it can be up to a billion times the mass of the Sun. The image was created by the Event Horizon Telescope, a virtual telescope consisting of a global network of eight radio telescopes. The telescope used interferometry, which means that the eight radio telescopes combined observations into one image. This arrangement allowed for the virtual telescope, which gathered over five petabytes of data in 2017. To put this in perspective, one petabyte is over a million gigabytes, which is why it took two years of analysis to find the image. The ring in the image appears to show the event horizon, which is the point where once passed, nothing can escape due to gravitational pull being so strong. However, it is actually the black hole’s shadow. This image is significant, and as Charles Alcock, director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said, “This is the first time we have an image of a black hole itself. This is a remarkable confirmation of more than a century of theoretical work”.

​Author: Ritik Sinha