The first image ever taken of a black hole was revealed by scientists on Wednesday, and the photo of the flaming yellow and black-colored ring has Chicago’s Adler Planetarium all worked up.
CHICAGO (CBS)–The first image ever taken of a black hole was revealed by scientists on Wednesday, and the photo of the flaming yellow and black-colored ring has Chicago’s Adler Planetarium all worked up.
Using data assembled from eight radio telescopes around the world, astronomers created the picture showing the violent neighborhood around a supermassive black hole, the light-sucking monsters of the universe theorized by Einstein more than a century ago and confirmed by observations for decades, according to the Associated Press.
The image of the black hole was compared by Jessica Dempsey, a co-discoverer and deputy director of the East Asian Observatory in Hawaii, as the powerful flaming Eye of Sauron from the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.
Unlike smaller black holes that come from collapsed stars, supermassive black holes are mysterious in origin. Situated at the center of most galaxies, including ours, they are so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational pull. This one’s “event horizon” — the point of no return around it, where light and matter begin to fall inexorably into the abyss — is as big as our entire solar system.
Three years ago, scientists using an extraordinarily sensitive observing system heard the sound of two much smaller black holes merging to create a gravitational wave, as Albert Einstein predicted. The new image, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and announced around the world in several news conferences, adds light to that sound.
Outside scientists suggested the achievement could be worthy of a Nobel Prize, just like the gravitational wave discovery.
