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 whopping 53.5 million light-years away from us. No single telescope on Earth can make that observation, so the EHT team had to get creative. Eight radio telescopes at six locations formed the Event Horizon Telescope Array, which contributed the data used to calculate the image of the black hole in the Messier 87 galaxy:

  • Hawaii: James Clerk Maxwell Telescope & Submillimeter Array at an altitude of 4,092m
  • Mexico: Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano (4,600m)
  • Arizona: Submillimeter Telescope (3,185m)
  • Spain: IRAM NOEMA observatory, Sierra Nevada (2,850m)
  • Chile: APEX (5,100m) and ALMA (5,000m) telescopes, Atacama Desert
  • Antarctica: South Pole Telescope (2,800m)

To capture an accurate image at such a distance, the telescopes needed to be stable, and their readings completely synchronised. To accomplish this challenging feat, the team used atomic clocks accurate enough to lose no more than one second per hundred million years. The 5 petabytes (5000 terabytes / 5000000 gigabytes) of data thus collected was so large that it had to be stored on hundreds of hard drives and physically delivered to a supercomputer, which corrected the time differences in the data and produced the image above. The algorithm for capturing the image was led by MIT graduate Katie Bouman.

The Bottom Line

Almost two decades of research have finally paid off. The capturing of the first-ever black hole image is indeed a scientific breakthrough. It is quite the achievement for the researchers of the EHT team and will positively lead to many more discoveries in the field of space exploration. The only upsetting part about this whole ordeal is that the legendary Physicist, Stephen Hawking, isn't here with us to experience this mind-boggling discovery.

A lot is yet to be discovered about this "monster" with a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun and about black holes in general. With the advent of better imaging technology and techniques, humanity shall soon be able to unravel many more mysteries of the universe as we know it. I would like to end this post with this beautiful background made by u/mCProgram over at Reddit. Please click or tap the background to download a high-res version of the image.



Thank you for reading and have a great day ahead!

-Ritin Malhotra

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