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| Black Hole : first image and video of a black hole |
Yet with more observations like this one they are yielding their secrets. This is why NSF exists. We enable scientists and engineers to illuminate the unknown, to reveal the subtle and complex majesty of our universe."
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| Black Hole |
But the latest observations take astronomers right to its threshold for the first time, illuminating the event horizon beyond which all known physical laws collapse.
"This is a huge day in astrophysics," NSF Director France Córdova said in a statement. "We're seeing the unseeable. Black holes have sparked imaginations for decades. They have exotic properties and are mysterious to us.
The black hole itself – a cosmic trapdoor from which neither light nor matter can escape – is unseeable.
For the first time ever, as shown above, we finally have an "image" of this celestial monster.
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| Black Hole |
To see the black hole’s boundary between light and dark, the astrophysicists captured radio waves—light 1.3 millimeters in wavelength, invisible to the human eye—emitted by the gas swirling around the black hole. The gas emits light of all different wavelengths, including visible light, but the researchers chose this particular wavelength because it can sail through entire galaxies and even Earth’s own atmosphere without being absorbed. But they still needed good weather at all eight of their telescope sites to see the black hole. Before switching on their telescopes, they had to monitor the moisture in the air, says Özel—too much humidity would ruin their images. To minimize the chance of rain, they built the telescopes in dry regions, including the South Pole and the Atacama Desert in Chile.
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| Black Hole |
The halo’s crescent-like appearance in the image is because the particles in the side of the disc rotating towards Earth are flung towards us faster and so appear brighter. The dark shadow within marks the edge of the event horizon, the point of no return, beyond which no light or matter can travel fast enough to escape the inexorable gravitational pull of the black hole.
"Instead of building a telescope so big that it would probably collapse under its own weight, we combined eight observatories like the pieces of a giant mirror," Michael Bremer, an astronomer at the International Research Institute for Radio Astronomy (IRAM) and a project manager for the Event Horizon Telescope, is quoted as saying at the time. "This gave us a virtual telescope as big as Earth — about 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) in diameter."