First-ever image of ‘monster’ black hole captured

In a historic feat, astronomers announced on Wednesday that they have captured the first-ever image of a black hole in a distant galaxy — the biggest tribute to the late Stephen Hawking who theorised about the existence of black holes emitting radiation in the universe.

The image — taken by a network of eight telescopes acrossthe world — shows luminous gas swirling around a supermassive black hole atthe centre of “Messier 87”, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgogalaxy cluster, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) said in a statement.

   

Described by the scientists as “a monster”, theblack hole resides 55 million light years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billiontimes that of the Sun.

The team of scientists took almost 12 years to capture theimage of a black hole.

“We have taken the first picture of a black hole. Thisis an extraordinary scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200researchers,” said Sheperd S. Doeleman from the Center for Astrophysics atHarvard and Smithsonian and Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Project Director.

The EHT is a global network of radio telescopes that worktogether as one virtual, Earth-sized telescope, with a resolution sharp enoughto “see” a black hole’s shadow.

The breakthrough was announced in a series of six paperspublished in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Black holes are extraordinary cosmic objects with enormousmasses but extremely compact sizes.

The presence of these objects affects their environment inextreme ways, warping spacetime and superheating any surrounding material.

“If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowinggas, we expect a black hole to create a dark region similar to a shadow –something predicted by Einstein’s general relativity that we’ve never seenbefore,” explained Heino Falcke of Radboud University, the Netherlands.

The space-time phenomenon was theorised by Einstein morethan a century ago and later by British theoretical physicist Hawking who diedlast year.

His theoretical prediction was that black holes emitradiation, often called Hawking radiation.

Multiple calibration and imaging methods revealed aring-like structure with a dark central region — the black hole’s shadow —that persisted over multiple independent EHT observations.

According to the EHT, the black hole’s boundary — the eventhorizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller thanthe shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across.

“The confrontation of theory with observations isalways a dramatic moment for a theorist. It was a relief and a source of prideto realise that the observations matched our predictions so well,”elaborated EHT Board member Luciano Rezzolla of Goethe Universit�t, Germany.

“We have achieved something presumed to be impossiblejust a generation ago. We have taken a picture of a black hole,” notedDoeleman.

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