Wednesday, April 10, 2019

First-Ever Photo of a Black Hole Unveiled !



Here it is! The first-ever photo of a black hole! The M87 galaxy is 53 million light-years away from Earth. What we see in this picture is the silhouette of the black hole as it was 53 million years ago. It don't look like but this black hole is a monster. Its mass is 6.4 billion times that of the Sun!

How did they succeed to get this picture? Black holes are relatively small. It is therefore necessary to have an instrument of a monstrous resolution to see them. To give you a comparison, one must be able to distinguish an apple on the moon from the Earth. No current instrument is capable of it. Fortunately, there is a scientific magic trick called very long base interferometry, which combines the signals received by different radio telescopes spread all over the Earth, to create a virtual antenna several thousand kilometers in diameter. That's what the EHT did.

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