Revelations Of The Gargantuan M87

The infinite black holds the key to The Universe.

In the heart of a galaxy far away resides an interstellar object nearly 53 Million light years away from our planet. These objects have always been classified as ones which cannot be seen with any equipment of our world until now. On 10th April 2019 scientists revealed the very first image of the object - a Black Hole.

What is A Black Hole ?

A Black Hole is a region of space having gravitational fields so strong not even light can escape. A Black Hole consists of mainly 3 parts:

• Event Horizon

• Corona

• Singularity

All About The M87 Cluster Galaxy

Messier 87 is a super-elliptical galaxy which is one of the biggest galaxies in the known universe. Thestars are distributed symmetrically and their consistency decreases as we get away from the center of the galaxy. The galactic nucleus consists of an active black hole which was the main objective of the scientists to capture. The galaxy is a very strong source of radio waves unlike other galaxies at it's close proximity.

How Did We Do It?

Theories have been written which can lead to incredible inventions and innovations but due to the impracticality of those theories, most of them never see the light of day and never receive research funds necessary to make it applicable for our daily lives. One of them was to make a dish the size of Earth to capture the first image of a black hole.

Scientists devised a way to make a giant dish which is not physical but virtual in nature. They used a technique called "Very Long Baseline Interferometry" or in short VLBI which combines radio waves of other telescopes at once working together like one giant dish.

The diameter of the virtual dish is equal to the length of the longest distance, or baseline, between two telescopes in the network. For the EHT in 2017, that was the distance from the South Pole to Spain.

What The Image Tells Us

The image is shown to be the supermassive black hole containing the same mass as 6.5 billion solar suns. This landmark image is the world's first glimpse of a black hole's silhouette which delves right into the heart of infinity. The algorithms used to resolve the image quality of the processed data was created by Katie Boumen, a MIT graduate student & her entire image processing team. Their hard work and dedication led to this amazing achievement which will benefit the scientific community by creating the foundation for other research projects on other celestial objects.

Bottom Line

The released image is a breakthrough achievement of our generation since it finally gives strong evidence which cements the existence of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity and Time Dilation . This photo in future will lead to various other exciting discoveries and theories about how our Universe actually came to be as we see today.