Powehi - The Black Hole
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of radio antennae around the globe, has captured the first image of a black hole event horizon. That's right, folks, they turned the earth into one giant telescope to capture the what seemed to be the uncapturable. Here it is, the mighty black hole situated at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy as captured on 10th April, 2019. Stephen Hawking would be proud. The image above shows an intensely bright 'Ring of Fire', as Prof Falcke describes it, surrounding a perfectly circular dark hole. The bright halo is caused by super-heated gas falling into the hole. The light is brighter than all the billions of other stars in the galaxy combined - which is why it can be seen at such distance from Earth. However, as immense and powerful as this black hole is, when viewed from the earth, it is extremely small. Compared to the full moon, the shadow cast by the M87 black hole is 46.5 million times smaller. M87's black hole is a...