The National Science Foundation on Wednesday revealed the first-ever picture captured of a black hole.
The black hole in the image is at present at the middle of a massive galaxy in the Virgo cluster, Messier 87. The galaxy M87 is 500 million trillion km away from Earth. The black hole measures 40 billion km across, which is three million times the size of Earth!
Black holes are extremely dense pockets of matter, objects of such incredible mass and minuscule volume that they drastically warp the fabric of space-time. Anything that passes too close, from a wandering star to a photon of light, gets captured.
Event Horizon Telescope, a group of eight telescopes stationed across the globe, helped take the image. The telescopes captured all the light it could detect near the black hole, and the data was brought together and made int the image.
“Black holes have long inspired the imagination yet challenged discovery. However, from a combination of theory and observation, scientists now know much about these objects and how they form, and can even see how they impact their surroundings,” The NSF page about “how black holes are studied,” reveals.
