Scientists shed light on black hole with first photo
- Astronomers released the first-ever photo of a black hole — the mysterious dying stage of a heavyweight star with such a huge gravity that even light, the fastest runner in the universe, can’t escape its pull, making it literally black.
- Four images of the black hole were released as part of six scientific papers. All of them show a central dark region surrounded by a ring of light that appears lopsided — brighter on one side than the other. The existence of such cosmic monsters that devour everything was first predicted by Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity in 1915, but so far none was observed directly in the absence of light.
- Their presence at the core of numerous galaxies was established through mathematical calculations, but it was left to the artists to portray these celestial giants using their power of imagination.
- An international team of more than 200 scientists used a network of eight sophisticated ground-based radio telescopes around the world to create an earth-sized virtual observatory named Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) that captured the image of a super-massive black hole located at the centre of the Messier 87, a galaxy within the Virgo galaxy cluster, about 55 million light years from earth. Named M87 Star, the black hole has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the sun.
