The photograph taken is very similar to a photograph of the German scientist Albert Einstein.
An international team announced today, Wednesday, April 10 , the first real image of a black hole captured by a global network of telescopes stretching from China to the United States, passing through Japan, Chile, Belgium and Taiwan.
France Cordova, a member of the research team behind the Horizon Telescope project: “The moment of the announcement is great after it revealed to humanity something that had been invisible for decades.”
She added, “This historic image came about after international efforts and cooperation between countries,” noting that “it would not have been possible without this cooperation.”
The researcher involved in capturing the image, Chipdolamine, posed for a picture of the black hole amid applause at a press conference held in Washington, D.C., just before that.
He said, “Sheep.” The captured image perfectly matches the German scientist Albert Einstein’s conception of the shape of black holes.
Luciano Rizzola, professor of astrophysics and relativity at Goethe University in Frankfurt and one of the study’s authors, said: “The research team collected enough data to fill a ton of hard drives. The algorithms they devised transformed the tangled information and arranged it into a single, understandable picture.”
Rissola notes that the information gathered from the network of telescopes posed a significant challenge due to its “abundance,” adding that “researchers spent about nine months analyzing it using supercomputers that simulate how material rotates around a black hole.”
“Simulating nature according to our expectations was one of the most exciting moments of my life,” says Risola. “It was a source of pride that nature perfectly mirrored our expectations of it. When the computer created the image of the black hole, I felt joy mixed with disbelief; I was one of the first to look at the image of a ‘human monster swallowing everything around it,’ an image of a black hole that will never leave my mind, until the end of time.”
The black hole has a diameter of approximately 40 billion kilometers, more than three million times the size of Earth, and a mass equivalent to 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun. It is located about 500 million trillion kilometers from our blue planet .
Researchers used data from eight observatories spread across four continents to create this fog, which for the first time reveals the event horizon surrounding a black hole.
Black holes are among the most mysterious regions of the universe. They do not obey the ordinary laws of physics. Black holes possess unimaginable mass, so their gravity is so strong that even light—traveling at 300,000 kilometers per second—cannot escape them. Because light cannot escape black holes, they remain completely invisible.
The basic concept of black holes dates back to the 18th century , when the renowned English scientist Isaac Newton and the French astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace demonstrated the particle nature of light. According to this concept, light consists of particles that accumulate on the surfaces of stars, forming a mass that increases the star’s gravity.
In the 20th century, Einstein argued that Newton’s and Laplace’s postulates implied that stars could transform into what are known as black holes. In 1917 , the physicist Carl Schwarzschild formulated a set of equations describing the conditions under which a star can become a black hole when it reaches a critical size and its density and gravity become extremely high.
When any object crosses the event horizon – a specific distance from the center of the black hole – it is attracted to the black hole with great force, and this object is torn apart and swallowed by the black hole. This process results in the transmission of waves of X-rays that can be observed from the surface of the planet using various telescopes.
But the observation remained theoretical, because photographing the surroundings of a black hole would require a telescope the size of a planet, which is practically impossible.
However, the researchers involved in the study found a way to monitor the radiation by forming a network of telescopes distributed in different parts of the planet, which can simultaneously monitor – and finely tune using atomic clocks – the radiation emitted during the process of the black hole swallowing up origins that have crossed the event horizon.
The researchers targeted two black holes, one known as Sagittarius A*, located 26,000 light-years away at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The other, called M87 , is located at the center of the Virgo A* galaxy, 54 light-years away.
Through highly complex computer programs and using algorithms that remove unwanted signals from the sky, researchers were able to obtain a huge amount of information, and within two years, the program processed it to form the first real image of a black hole located at the heart of the M87 galaxy.
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