First Ever Black Hole Picture Released In Space Breakthrough

black hole
Image: EHT

As part of what space enthusiasts will refer to as a milestone, the first-ever image of the black hole has been captured.

The image was taken by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), with a network of eight radio telescopes spread across Antarctica to Spain and Chile. A team of 200 scientists attained the breakthrough.

The black hole image shows a bright disc of gases and dust along with a dark center, present in the Messier 87 galaxy which is 55 million light years from Earth. The black hole has a mass of around 6.5 billion times more than that of the Sun.

The photo of the black hole has been captured by the EHT taking up radiation from particles in the disk that are really hot.

For the uninitiated, a black hole is a place in space from where neither light or dust or for that matter anything can escape the entrapment, due to a strong gravitational pull. Additionally, the black hole consists of millions of particles and matter, all packed in extremely small sizes.

Furthermore, the cosmic objects are capable of bending spacetime and super-heating any object nearby.

We have achieved something presumed to be impossible just a generation ago,” said EHT project director Shepherd S. Doeleman.

Additionally, the network of telescopes made use of the technique called very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) which can sync all the telescopes around the world to form one massive telescope by altering Earth’s rotation.

We’ll be writing a detailed follow-up to this article, so stay tuned with us. Keep reading Fossbytes and sharing your useful suggestions.

Also Read: The First Black Hole Picture: Everything Interesting About The Breakthrough

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