Black Hole Picture Revealed for the First Time - BLACKHOLEPHOTO-articleLarge-v3.jpg ...

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Astronomers announced on Wednesday that at last they had seen the unseeable: a
black hole, a cosmic abyss so deep and dense that not even light can escape it.

“We’ve exposed a part of our universe we’ve never seen before,” said Shep
Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and
director of the effort to capture the image, during a Wednesday news conference
in Washington, D.C.

The image, of a lopsided ring of light surrounding a dark circle deep in the
heart of the galaxy known as Messier 87, some 55 million light-years away from
here, resembled the Eye of Sauron, a reminder yet again of the power and
malevolence of nature. It is a smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity.

To capture the image, astronomers reached across intergalactic space to a giant
galaxy known as Messier 87, in the constellation Virgo. There, a black hole
about seven billion times more massive than the sun is unleashing a violent jet
of energy some 5,000 light years into space.

The image offered a final, ringing affirmation of an idea so disturbing that
even Einstein, from whose equations black holes emerged, was loath to accept it.
If too much matter is crammed into one place, the cumulative force of gravity
becomes overwhelming, and the place becomes an eternal trap, a black hole. Here,
according to Einstein’s theory, matter, space and time come to an end and vanish
like a dream.

On Wednesday morning that dark vision became a visceral reality. When the image
was put up on the screen in Washington, cheers and gasps, followed by applause,
broke out.

The image emerged from two years of computer analysis of observations from a
network of radio antennas called the Event Horizon Telescope. In all, eight
radio observatories on six mountains and four continents observed the galaxy in
Virgo on and off for 10 days in April 2017.

The telescope array also monitored a dim source of radio noise called
Sagittarius A* (pronounced Sagittarius A-star), at the heart of our Milky Way
galaxy. There, 26,000 light-years from Earth, and buried in the depths of
interstellar dust and gas, another black hole, with a mass of 4.1 million suns,
almost certainly lurks.

The network is named after the edge of a black hole, the point of no return;
beyond the event horizon, not even light can escape the black hole’s
gravitational pull.

For some years now, the scientific literature, news media and films such as
“Interstellar” and the newly released “High Life” have featured remarkably
sophisticated and highly academic computer simulations of black holes. But the
real thing looked different. For starters, the black holes in movies typically
are not surrounded by fiery accretion disks of swirling, doomed matter, as are
the black holes in Virgo and Sagittarius.

Perhaps even more important, the images provide astrophysicists with the first
look at the innards of a black hole. The energy within is thought to be powerful
enough to power quasars and other violent phenomena from the nuclei of galaxies,
including the jets of intense radiation that spew 5,000 light years from the
galaxy M87.

As hot, dense gas swirls around the black hole, like water headed down a drain,
the intense pressures and magnetic fields cause energy to squirt from either
side. As a paradoxical result, supermassive black holes, which lurk in the
centers of galaxies, can be the most luminous objects in the universe.




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