The world of science was lit Wednesday when scientists were able to release what’s being touted as the first ever image of a black hole.
The image itself was acquired via a network of telescopes from around the World called the Event Horizon Telescope which was able to zoom in on the massive void within the M87 galaxy.
Via Science News:
“We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole,” Sheperd Doeleman, EHT Director and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., said April 10 in Washington, D.C., at one of seven concurrent news conferences. The results were also published in six papers in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“We’ve been studying black holes so long, sometimes it’s easy to forget that none of us have actually seen one,” France Córdova, director of the National Science Foundation, said in the Washington, D.C., news conference. Seeing one “is a Herculean task,” she said.
With all that said, you really can’t see a black hole which goes to show that the image above depicting what appears to be some kind of flaming Spaghetti-O isn’t actually a picture of the void but composed data from these telescopes that shows the shadow of the black hole.
Not that any of this should discredit what was actually accomplished here. Even getting a shadow image of something that’s generally speaking impossible to see is pretty damn remarkable. Especially considering too this massive hole is estimated to be 38 billion kilometers in size, 7.2 billion times more massive than our Sun and 55-million light-years away from Earth.
