The Black Hole

Just now NASA has released an image of black hole and it has got the attention of everyone from the whole world. Picture shows a halo of dust and gas. This black hole is situated at the heart of Messier 87 galaxy, 55 m light years from earth.

Wikipedia defines BLACK HOLE as -" a region of spacetime exhibiting such strong gravitational effects that nothing—not even particles and electromagnetic radiation such as light—can escape from inside it. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole."To capture this one picture of black hole ,it required the hardwork of 200 scientists and a network of eight radio telescopes sweeping locations from Antarctica, Spain and Chile. This breakthrough image was captured by Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) .

EHT director and Harvard University senior research fellow ,Sheperd Doeleman remarked “Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe. We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have taken a picture of a black hole.” This image being the first ever image of black hole gives us the direct glimpse of accretion disc, a ring of dust and gas that steadily feeds the "monster" within . History of black hole goes back to the time when Einstein lived and when Theory of Relativity was given. Though even Einstein was little doubtful whether they existed or not. Now the main thing is how the scientists got an image of a black hole whose existance was termed doubtful by Einstein himself. We all knowthat telescopes are used to see the objects which are located far away in the space. Larger the aperture of the telescope, greater is it's ability to gather more light. VLBI technique was used by scientists to get the image of black hole. Very Long Baseline Interferometry or VLBI is a technique that allows for the imaging of far-away objects. Basically it is a technique in which an array of smaller telescopes is created that are synchronized to focus on the same object at the same time. In this way,it acts like a big telescope. Each telescope used had to be highly synchronized with the other with few millimetres ,this was achieved using atomic clock.

Now since the image of this giant body is out , many people are saying that the image is blur and many are appreciating it as well. So much hardwork has been done for this one image and it must be appreciated by everyone.