First Images of a Black Hole

Incredible images. The New York Times article about it (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/science/black-hole-picture.amp.html)

said the audience gasped and applauded when the images were first shown. It's incredible that Einstein predicted, somewhat to his own surprise, that black holes would exist and would  be round, and the article said that "an astrophysicist at Yale, said that Einstein must be delighted. "His theory has just been stress-tested under conditions of extreme gravity, and looks to have held up."...with no signs of deviations from general relativity."

Actually, although this is a landmark event, I think recent history will be divided into the time before and after the first human was genetically modified in China, not before and after this image of a black hole. Time will tell.

Tom

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Joshua Glant

News might have reached you already, but scientists today revealed images taken by the Event Horizon Telescope – the first images ever taken of a black hole, in the center of Galaxy M87! Scientists "knew" that they existed, but before now, there was no direct visual proof of their existence. Some have described this scientific achievement as absolutely seminal in the progress of mankind: "history will be divided into the time before the image, and the time after."

Black holes are so heavy that not even light can escape from being sucked into their gravity and pulled over the event horizon (the edge of the black hole's physical singularity), so no direct observation of a black hole itself is physically possible. But some black holes are big enough that you can see light being sucked towards it and swirling in a massive ring before crossing over the event horizon and being sucked in! That's what this picture captures – the "shadow" of an absolutely monstrous black hole. The black hole is so distant that the actual image is pretty unclear as of the initial effort, but the general observation lines up exactly with what Einstein would have expected in his general theory of relativity, 100 years ago.

The first image is what the scientists captured, and the second is a computer-generated imitation of what scientists expect that it actually looks like. With this first image taken and released, scientists are now working to develop even better images so we can work to further understand some of the strangest celestial phenomena in our universe.

There are still many mysteries in the universe that we know very little about.