Home Business News First ever Black Hole picture revealed by scientists

First ever Black Hole picture revealed by scientists

by Peter Smyth Tech Journalist
10th Apr 19 4:19 pm

On Wednesday afternoon the first photo of a black hole in outer space, has been revealed for the first time.

Scientists at the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) programme showed their results at news conferences around the world today.

EHT pointed eight radio telescopes at two cosmic behemoths, one was pointing almost 54m light years away, and the other was pointing at the Milky Way.

Director France Córdova of the US National Science Foundation said, “This is a huge day in astrophysics” and “We’re seeing the unseeable.”

As black holes do not let light escape scientists have to instead look for a ring of light, disrupted matter and radiation that circles at high speed, around the region of darkness.

Scientists have called the black hole “a monster” as it measures some 40bn km across and is 3m times the size of planet earth.

Prof Heino Falcke, of Radboud University in the Netherlands, who started the experiment, told BBC News, the black hole was found in a galaxy called M87.

He added, “What we see is larger than the size of our entire Solar System,” he said.

“It has a mass 6.5bn 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.”

Dr Ziri Younsi, of University College London who is part of the collaboration said, “Although they are relatively simple objects, black holes raise some of the most complex questions about the nature of space and time, and ultimately of our existence.

“It is remarkable that the image we observe is so similar to that which we obtain from our theoretical calculations. So far, it looks like Einstein is correct once again.”

Leave a Comment

You may also like

CLOSE AD

Sign up to our daily news alerts

[ms-form id=1]