The BLACK discovery that proves Einstein’s HOLE theory: first image of a
THE first photograph of a black hole surrounded by a swirling ring of fire has been unveiled by scientists who have likened it to the “gates of Hell at the end of space and time”.
The image, captured by a global team of more than 200 scientists using eight telescopes, shows superheated matter being pulled towards the event horizon never to be seen again.
It is the first visual proof of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which predicts that when enough mass collapses together, it deforms space-time creating a field of gravity that pulls even light inside.
“We are giving humanity its first view of a black hole, a one-way door out of our universe,” said Dr Shep Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team, which has been hunting for a black hole for a decade.
“It’s the discovery of my lifetime and I think of many other people’s lifetimes,” he added.
Until now, black holes have only been seen indirectly through their impact on nearby galaxies and stars.
It was thought they would be impossible to observe.
But researchers, including astrophysicists at University College London (UCL), looked for the shadows cast by super-heated pieces of space rock and dust as they tumbled into the black hole.
The image, hailed as a “huge breakthrough for humanity”, shows a glowing mass of plasma with a clear circular area of distorted space-time in the centre.
Prof Heino Falcke, of Radboud University in Holland, unveiled the image at a press briefing in Brussels. He said: “It looks like a ring of fire, and it’s being created by the distortion in space-time. It looks like the gates of Hell at the end of space and time.”
Dr Ziri Younsi of UCL’S Mullard Space Science Laboratory said: “We have accomplished something many thought impossible by imaging the shadow of a black hole and it provides the strongest evidence to date that such evasive and enigmatic entities do indeed exist.
“You could never actually see a black hole, but because it is so powerful you can see when matter starts to fall into it, getting closer and closer.
“I was amazed to see the image. I got a sense of tremendous excitement.
“It’s something we have been working on for 10 years and actually the image was surprisingly unsurprising. Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicted an image like this.
“But at the same time I thought, ‘Wow, what does this mean now? How will this help our understanding of the universe?’ We now need to start analysing the granular image and get into the nitty gritty.
“Black holes are such mysterious objects. They represent a point of the universe which is really also the edge of time. If you dropped a torch into one you would see the light extend forever getting dimmer but taking an infinite time to reach the event horizon.”
The new image is of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the distant galaxy, Messier 87, which is 55million light-years away in the Virgo star system. It measures just under 25billion miles across – 3 million times the diameter of the Earth – and has a mass of 6.5billion times that of the Sun.
Although supermassive black holes are relatively tiny astronomical objects, it was one of the largest which could be seen from Earth, making it the perfect target for the EHT project. Telescopes were located in volcanoes in Hawaii and Mexico, the mountains of Arizona, Spain’s Sierra Nevada, the Chilean Atacama Desert and Antarctica. The observations were made in 2017 using a technique called verylong-baseline interferometry, which synchronises telescopes around the world and exploits Earth’s rotation to form a
single planetsized telescope. The researchers collected roughly 350 terabytes of data per day, which was stored on hard drives and flown to supercomputers in Germany and the United States for conversion into an image.
Carlos Moedas, European Commissioner for Research Innovation and Science, described the image as a “huge breakthrough for humanity”.
“The history of science will be divided into the time before the image and the time after the image,” he said.
“Stephen Hawking once said that it is sad that facts are sometimes stranger than fiction and nowhere is that more true than in the case of black holes.
“Black holes are stranger than anything dreamt up in science.”
The research appears in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
‘The history of science will be divided into the time before the image and the time after the image’