The first picture of a black hole captured

By: Hunter McIntyre

Sports Editor

“In space no one can hear you scream; and in a black hole, no one can see you disappear,” Stephen Hawking wrote in his book “Black Holes: The Reith Lectures.”

Dr. Katie Bouman, a 29-year-old scientist working for EHT, was credited for taking the first ever photograph confirming the existence of black holes on April.  

The EHT, event horizon telescope, is an international collaboration of scientists. Research in the U.S. was mainly done by the National Science Foundation.

The image has been partially credited to Bouman who was responsible for leading the computer program development that gave us the image.

“When we saw it for the first time, we were all in disbelief. It was quite spectacular,” Dr. Bouman said. (BBC Live)

She stated that an algorithm is not the work of one individual but a whole group.

The photo shows the shadow of a supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87, an elliptical galaxy approximately 55 million light years from Earth.

The black hole itself weighs around 6.5 billion times the weight of our sun. It is larger than the entire solar system.

The shadow was the only obtainable picture because black holes emit no light and consume any reflected light, making a typical photograph impossible.

Scientists initially thought that it would take much longer to take a picture of a black hole.

The original plan was to just build a massive telescope. However, EHT discovered that combining the power of eight ground-based radio telescopes from around the globe, they could observe a complete picture of the black hole’s shadow.

“Years ago, we thought we would have to build a very large space telescope to image a black hole. By getting radio telescopes around the world to work in concert like one instrument, the EHT team achieved this, decades ahead of time,” Paul Hertz, director of the astrophysics division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said. (NASA)

To improve and add to the picture, X-ray imaging was used to measure the wavelengths and movement of matter from the black hole.

This allowed EHT to view all the visible light possible in the image.

“X-rays help us connect what’s happening to the particles near the event horizon with what we can measure with our telescopes,” Joey Neilsen, an astronomer at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, said. (NASA)

Light takes time to travel, therefore the image was of light from 55 million years ago. Due to this, it could look vastly different if we could view it from within one lightyear away.

It is the same reason why light takes around eight minutes to reach us from the sun.

Until now, black holes have been a theory backed by science but researchers have not been able to find proof. This picture reveals that the science, math and astrophysics theorized by researchers are now factual.

The image of the Messier 87 black hole answered many questions for scientists. The EHT plans to continue monitoring the image and the black hole considering many are calling it one of the important discoveries in the past decade.

However this discovery may lead to more questions than actual answers.