The First Black Hole Image Released

The first pictures of a black hole released on April 10thJakarta time, simultaneously released in the world and more. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) announced that it had captured the first visual evidence of a supermassive black hole. The black hole image revealed a black hole at the center of the supermassive Galaxy M87 in the Virgo Cluster, 55 million light-years away from Earth and 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun.

The research was carried out by the Event Horizon Telescope project, which began in 2012 and aims to use a global network of ground telescopes to directly observe the surrounding environment of black holes. The photos were released at press conferences held simultaneously in several cities around the world. The picture shows a black hole at the center of galaxy M87. The black hole is about 55 million light-years away from Earth. Despite its huge mass, black holes are extremely difficult to observe. The event horizon of a black hole refers to the region around which matter cannot escape.
"This is a great day for astrophysics," said Francis Cordoba, head of the National Science Foundation. We saw something invisible."
Since light cannot escape from a black hole, it is extremely difficult to observe it. Scientists show actual black holes by outlining dark areas around the halo, diffuse matter and radiation moving at extremely fast speeds along the event horizon. This is the so-called "shadow" or "outline" of a black hole.

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According to Kyodo News Agency on April 10, the International Team held a press conference at several locations around the world on April 10, announcing the first successful shot of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way away from Earth. This time, through the cooperation of radio telescopes around the country, the very high resolution observation has been achieved.It is reported that there have been previous precedents for observing X-ray emission from gas engulfed by black holes, but it is the first time that a black hole can be captured directly without light escaping. Einstein's theory of general relativity, which predicted the existence of black holes more than a hundred years ago, was confirmed by experts, who affirmed that "this is a Nobel Prize-level achievement that helps to solve the mysterious nature of black holes".

Writer Zweig once wrote in his book The Stars of Mankind: If there is a moment of historic significance, this moment will surely affect decades or even centuries.Jakarta time on April 10, 2019 at 20:07 p.m. may be such a moment.One hundred years ago, Einstein's theory of general relativity was first tested and validated, and now it is again "strongly supported". "Einstein is a genius, and he's right!"

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It's not easy to take a picture of a black hole, and developing a picture takes a long time. Radio telescopes can't "see" black holes directly, but they will collect a lot of data about black holes and use the data to describe the shape of black holes to scientists. After the observation, the data collected by the stations will be collected in two data centers (Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts, USA, and Map Radio Institute in Bonn, Germany). There, by replaying the data recorded on the hard disk, the supercomputer integrates all the data and performs calibration analysis after compensating for the time difference between radio waves arriving at different telescopes, thus producing a high-resolution image of a black hole.
Since then, after two years of "development", on April 10, 2019, the first black hole photograph in human history has finally come out.