First ever black hole photo changes how we see the universe

An international team of scientists on Wednesday evening (9 p.m. PHL time) unveiled the world’s first real image of a black hole. It is the first actual glimpse of a phenomenon that has fascinated humanity for centuries but has remained tantalizingly unobserved until now.

The photo, unveiled by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration at a joint press conference organized by the US National Science Foundation, shows the event horizon of the black hole at the center of Messier 87 (M87), or the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy some 55 million light-years away from Earth.

The photo is remarkable in that the image matches the theoretical appearance of black holes based on decades of research.

“This is the strongest evidence we have to date of the existence of black holes,” said EHT director Shep Doeleman, who noted that the image fits precisely with what is expected from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun pic.twitter.com/AymXilKhKe

— Event Horizon 'Scope (@ehtelescope) April 10, 2019

The EHT Collaboration is a global network of observatories working together to observe black hole phenomena. By coordinating with each other, the various member observatories basically turn the entire globe into a giant observatory.

First theorized in 1784, black holes are difficult to visualize because their gravity is so great that not even light can escape them. But while nobody can see a black hole directly, it may be possible to see its event horizon: the point of no return beyond which there is no escape for any matter that’s swirling around it.

Scientists now believe that most galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers.

Our own Milky Way galaxy, for example, has Sagittarius A*, located some 26,000 light-years away from Earth and with a mass equivalent to 4 million of our sun. But M87, as it turns out, is a giant among giants at 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun—one of the reasons why scientists were able to take a photo of it.

“M87 is massive even among supermassive black holes. It’s almost the size of our entire solar system,” said University of Amsterdam astrophysics professor Sera Markoff. — BM, GMA News