The image of the M87 Black Hole from the front
The First Black Hole Image
The first ever image and a great achievement
The picture of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, which is around 54 million light-years away, was taken a few weeks ago.
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The black hole at its center is massive, some 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun. But viewed from 54 million light-years away on Earth, the black hole is only about 42 microarcseconds across on the sky. That’s smaller than taking a photo of an orange on the moon!
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So, what exactly is a black hole? A black hole is a region where space and time have collapsed on itself, forming a single point with infinite density. Well, this is the scientific definition. To make it simple, imagine a fish swimming near the top of a waterfall. At one point, the water is rushing so quickly that the fish cannot escape by swimming in the other direction. This is the same idea for a black hole. When matter, light, anything gets too close to the black hole, it sucks it up and removes it from the universe.
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Then, how was the image obtained? Many would wonder how scientists actually took the image; it’s so small! The answer is that the image was taken when eight radio telescopes all pointed their dishes to the black hole in the center of our galaxy. So all of you who thought they took it with a camera, or even an iPhone, that’s not really true. To see the black hole’s boundary between light and dark, the astrophysicists captured radio waves since it can sail through entire galaxies and even Earth’s own atmosphere without being absorbed.
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What is the big deal of this black hole image? Is it just overrated? Well, the significance of this image is that it proves that the main theory that physicists use to explain the force of gravity, the theory of general relativity, is correct. Maybe it is not a big deal to most of you, but it is an incredible achievement to astrophysicists. The picture also offers the strongest evidence yet that what humans long thought about galaxies is true, that they contain supermassive black holes at their centers that contain points-of-no-return for light, called event horizons.
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This image is just the beginning; astrophysicists want to pivot their telescopes toward other black holes, to amass a whole scrapbook of black hole images. They also plan to take more, better-quality pictures of this black hole to understand it in more detail.
