Astronomers reveal first image of a black hole
WASHINGTON — Humanity got its first glimpse Wednesday of the cosmic place of no return: a black hole.
And it’s as hot, as violent and as beautiful as science fiction imagined.
In a breakthrough that thrilled the world of astrophysics and stirred talk of a Nobel Prize, scientists released the first image ever made of a black hole, revealing a fiery doughnut-shaped object in a galaxy 53 million light-years from Earth.
“Science fiction has become science fact,” University of Waterloo theoretical physicist Avery Broderick, one of the leaders of the research team of about 200 scientists from 20 countries, declared as the colorized orange-and-black picture was unveiled.
The image, assembled from data gathered by eight radio telescopes around the world, shows light and gas swirling around the lip of a supermassive black hole, a monster of the universe whose existence was theorized by Einstein more than a century ago but confirmed only indirectly over the decades.
Supermassive black holes are situated at the center of most galaxies, including ours, and are so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational pull. Light gets bent and twisted around by gravity in a bizarre funhouse effect as it gets sucked into the abyss along with superheated gas and dust.
The new image confirmed yet another piece of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Einstein even predicted the object’s neatly symmetrical shape.
“We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole,” announced Sheperd Doeleman of Harvard, leader of the project.
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 Einstein predicted. The new image, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and announced around the world, adds light to that sound. Outside scientists suggested the achievement could be worthy of a Nobel Prize.
