Historical Moment: First real black hole image revealed

The picture taken is very similar to imagine of the German scientist Albert Einstein.

An international team announced today, Wednesday, April 10, the first real image of a black hole taken by a global network of telescopes extending from China to the United States, passing through Japan, Chile, Belgium and Taiwan.

Frans Cordova, a member of the research team based on the project “Horizon Telescope”: “The moment of the announcement is great after revealing to humans something that has been invisible for decades.”

She added, “Cordova” that “the historical picture came after the international efforts and nations have cooperated with each other,” noting that “it would not have been possible to do it without that cooperation.”

The researcher involved in taking the picture “Shepdolamin” the image of the black hole amid applause at a press conference held in the US capital, “Washington” just before.

He said, “Scheep” The picture taken exactly like the perception of the German scientist, “Albert Einstein,” the shape of black holes.

Luciano Rizzola, a professor of astrophysics and relativity at the University of Goethe in Frankfurt, and one of the study’s authors, said : “The research team has collected enormous data enough to fill a ton of hard drives. The algorithms created by the team transformed the messy information and arranged it into one understandable image. “

Risola points out that the information gathered from the telescopes’ network posed a major challenge because of its “abundance,” adding that “the researchers spent about nine months analyzing it using supercomputers that simulated how the materials revolve around the black hole.”

Risola says: “The simulation of nature to our expectations was one of the most dramatic moments in my life, it was a source of pride that nature completely simulates our expectations of them, and when the computer created the image of the black hole, I felt the joy mixed with disbelief; I was one of the first to look at the picture “A human monster swallows all around him, a picture of a black hole that will never be absent from my imagination, until the end of time.”

The black hole is about 40 billion kilometers – more than three million times the Earth’s size – and its mass is 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. It is about 500 million trillion kilometers from our blue planet.

The researchers used data from eight observatories spread over four continents to create the blur, which for the first time illustrates the horizon of the event surrounding the black hole.

Black holes are one of the most mysterious regions of the universe. +Normal physics laws cannot be applied. Black holes have a mass beyond imagination, so their gravity is so strong that light – at a speed of 300,000 kilometers per second – cannot escape. Because light cannot escape black holes, they remain invisible at all.

The main idea of black holes dates back to the 18th century, when the famous English scientist Isaac Newton and the French astronomer Pierre Laplace demonstrated the particle nature of light. According to this idea, light is composed of particles that can accumulate on the stars’ surfaces, forming a mass that increases the attractiveness of The star.

In the twentieth century, Einstein said that Newton and Laplace’s assumptions meant that stars could turn into so-called black holes. In 1917, scientist Karl Schwarzschild developed a set of equations describing the state that could A star turns into a critical size and its density and attractiveness increases into a black hole.

When any object exceeds the horizon of the event – a specific distance away from the center of the black hole – is attracted to the black hole with great force, and that body disintegrates and swallows the hole, and this process results in the transmission of waves of X-rays can be detected from the surface of the planet using telescopes Different.

But the observation remained theoretical, because imaging the perimeter of the black hole requires a telescope the size of the size of the planet, which is practically impossible.

However, the researchers involved in the study found a way to monitor the rays, through the formation of a network of telescopes distributed in different parts of the planet, which can simultaneously monitor – and very precisely adjusted using atomic clocks – rays emitted during the process of ingestion of the black hole For assets that exceeded the event horizon.

The researchers targeted two black holes, one known as the Sagittarius A Star , 26,000 light-years away at the center of the Milky Way. The other is called the M87 , 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 software processed them to form the first real image of a black hole located in the heart of the galaxy M87.