Einstein’s wish fulfilled! Scientists unveil first-ever image of a super-massive black hole

Washington, Apr 11: The Black Hole, most mesmerizing as well as challenging object of space. From Einstein to Stephen Hawking, everyone tried to solve the mystery of the black hole. Finally, the dream of Einstein and many more came into reality. Scientists captured the first-ever image of a black hole.

A black hole is a bottomless pit in the universe from which not even light can escape. Black holes are perhaps the weirdest things in the cosmos until now hidden behind dust and gas and the striking radiation from the matter caught in their gravitational grip and spinning violently around them.

 

This highly awaited picture which was revealed on Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington and in the press conference in 6 cities across the world, presented an astonishing image of ‘Supermassive black hole’ at the center of Messier 87, a colossal galaxy about 55 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo.

This splendid job was done by the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of 10 radio telescopes spread all over the world and working as a single receiver, as one turned to high-frequency radio waves.

This success is a technological accomplishment for scientists which initiates a new chapter in the study of black holes, the galaxy formation and laws of Physics in extreme conditions. 

The image of the f M87 black hole looks like a dark shadow within a doughnut-like ring of hot and shining material.

On this occasion, Sera Markoff, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam said, “You’re basically looking at a supermassive black hole that’s almost the size of our solar system,” or 38 billion kilometers in diameter”.

The thrilling success of the observation is a bitter-sweet moment for scientists. because the new image does not upend the scientific consensus about black holes. The distinctive doughnut shape of the black hole matches what theorists had expected. Significantly, the M87 black hole doesn’t show any sign of disobeying the physics equations of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

This image is just the beginning, many scientists expressed.

Now scientists want to pivot their telescopes toward other black holes, to amass a whole scrapbook of black hole images. They also plan to take more, better-quality pictures of this black hole to understand it in more detail.