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first-Ever Image Of A Black Hole


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first-Ever Image Of A Black Hole

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Scientists used a global network of telescopes to see and capture the first-ever picture of a black hole, according to an announcement by researchers at the National Science Foundation Wednesday morning. They captured an image of the supermassive black hole and its shadow at the centre of a galaxy known as M87.

This is the first direct visual evidence that black holes exist, the researchers said. In the image, a central dark region is encapsulated by a ring of light that looks brighter on one side.

The massive galaxy, called Messier 87 or M87, is near the Virgo galaxy cluster 55 million light-years from Earth. The supermassive black hole has a mass that is 6.5 billion times that of our sun.

"We have seen what we thought was unseeable," said Sheperd Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. "We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole."

This is the first direct visual evidence that black holes exist, the researchers said. In the image, a central dark region is encapsulated by a ring of light that looks brighter on one side.

Though the telescopic data was gathered two years ago, completing the image took time due to the massive undertaking of delivering hundreds of terabytes of data - too much information to travel on the internet - worldwide by plane.

"We have achieved something presumed to be impossible just a generation ago," astrophysicist Sheperd Doeleman, director of the EHT at the Centre for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian said.

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Iconic physicist Albert Einstein first theorised the existence of black holes in his 1915 theory of general relativity but thought the idea was too outlandish to exist in reality.

Since then, the confounding entities have been studied by scientists around the world, including most prominently, by the late British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking.

David Sobral, an astrophysicist at Lancaster University, said that imaging the supermassive black hole was an "enormous achievement" for humankind.

"It completely confirms our idea that black holes really do exist and now the next step is we can start doing physics with it. We can really start to test the predictions and perhaps learn something new," he said.

Unlike smaller black holes that come from collapsed stars, supermassive black holes like the one in the image released on Wednesday are mysterious in origin. Situated at the centre of most galaxies, they are so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational pull.

NASA described the image as a "historic feat" in a Twitter post, while scientists not involved in the EHT have suggested the achievement could be worthy of a Nobel Prize.

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