First Ever Black Hole Image Captured

Located in a distant galaxy, a black hole has come alive to all the Earthians for the very first time, through its very first image. A network of eight linked telescopes, known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has made this quantum leap possible. Larger than our entire solar system, will this first picture of the black hole be able to throw some light on our age-old queries regarding time and space? Follow the story.

The black hole, also being called the ‘monster’ is 500 million trillion km away, found in a galaxy named M87 or Messier 87.

The captured image that resembles a blurred photograph of a light or fire, is described as a “ring of fire” by Prof Heino Falcke of Radboud University in the Netherlands. It is Prof Falcke who first proposed the experiment.

In an interview to BBC, Prof told, “It has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. And it is one of the heaviest black holes that we think exists. It is an absolute monster, the heavyweight champion of black holes in the Universe.”

Prof Falcke further added that the black hole perfectly circular of shape, surrounded by heated gas falling into the hole, generating the halo.

The black circle in the centre is the ‘black hole’ that has such immense gravitational pull that even light cannot escape.

This leads to the question, What is a Black Hole?

A shot from the film 'Intersteller'

Well, going by definition, a black hole is a region of spacetime with prodigious gravitational pull. No particle or electromagnetic radiation like light can escape its gravitational field. And unlike the name, a black hole is not at all empty. In fact, it has a great amount of matter packed within a very small area.

As predicted in the theory of relativity by Albert Einstein in the early 1900s, black holes are born when a big star collapses. Elaborated by NASA, “Most black holes form from the remnants of a large star that dies in a supernova explosion.” and “Even bigger black holes can result from stellar collisions.”

Since a very long time, the human kind have been making assumptions on what lies inside a black hole or what it would be like being inside it?

Stories, novels and films have repeatedly depicted several ideas surrounding black hole, for example, the ‘event horizon’ where apparently time stands still, or the concept of ‘time warp’. The 2014 released Christopher Nolan epic, ‘Intersteller’ plays with similar theories, from a very rational and convincing point of view.

A shot from the film 'Intersteller'

At the moment, several media houses are referring to the black hole image as ‘one of the most powerful objects in existence’. And guess what, as per sources, the future images are going to be much sharper.

So, do you think, the visual evidence of a black hole, taken from over 50 million light-years away can turn out to be revolutionary in the history of universal science and answer the longtime questions related time travel? Let me know in the comments!