Black Holes - Facts and Information | First ever real image of a black hole

For decades, black hole was considered a hypothetical object of scientific attraction, many did not believed on its existence as no proof was there for the existence of a real black hole. But now a real image of a super massive black hole in the centre of the galaxy Messier 87 has been captured and let's break it down.

First Real Image Of a Black Hole 

Discovery Of Black Holes -

It starts in the year 1784, when an English philosopher John Michell, thought about an object whose escape velocity is more than speed of light, but it was not taken seriously that time.

In the year 1915, The general theory of relativity by Albert Einstein stated that gravity influences the motion of light which means it can bend a beam of light.

On 29 may, 1919 happened the total solar eclipse, during which Sir Arthur Eddington  tested the general relativity theory which is known as Eddington expedition, he observed that the sun's gravity bend the light coming from distant stars, after which John Michell's hypothetical object was somewhat possible.

Also Read -
Time Travel : Is it possible? | Explained
Is the Iron Man suit Possible? Nanotechnology Explained

In 1915, Karl Schwarzschild , on the basis of general relativity theory, described the gravitational field of a point mass and the radius of that point is known as the schwarzschild radius which later took the name of singularity, a point mass whose gravity is insanely high, more than speed of light.

After researches many scientists concluded that these singularities can be possible but the biggest problem was that it can't be observed by us directly because even light can't get out of it. So we started studying the effect of a black hole on it surrounding object.

Later, we started observing the electromagnetic spectrum other than visible light.

During these times a dutch astronomer Marteen Schmidt was studying a radio source {3C 273}, he thought it was a big star but he accidentally discovered a super massive black hole, massive then most of the stars. 

Just like it a black hole lies in the centre of our milky way galaxy known as sagittarius A.

These black holes are so powerful that it attracts every object around itself, and these objects start revolving around the black holes with such a speed that it heats up and glows, which is an opportunity to us, to observe a black hole because the glowing disc known as Accretion Disc, can be used to watch black holes.

Real image of black hole vs Artistic Illustration

But to watch a super massive black hole, we'll need a telescope of the size of our planet, which is almost impossible, but then in the late 1960's many observatories around the globe was joined as a team names as Very-long base line interferometry (VLBI), all these radio telescopes work together as a big virtual telescope.

In 2009, from these radio obeservatories, 8 of them were combined to form a new telescope array, named as the event horizon telescope, which was built to extract a real image of a super massive black hole.

It isn't as easy as it sounds because black hole is an object which can't be seen and also it is 55 million light years away from earth. But why Messier 87 was chosen for this purpose -

• It has a large accretion disk.
• It is much bigger and powerful.

Only to take an image of this black hole more than 200 scientists, 8 Radio observatories and a hard work of 2 years was spent. Also making this telescope took more than 8 years.

On 5 April, 2017, the event horizon telescope was put to work and finally on 10 April 2019, we got the the first real image of a black hole, which wasn't much dissimilar from our illustrations. The total recorded data for this black hole was 27 Petabytes.

Conclusion :

We always have developed our curiosity in the field of space science and this real image of a black hole is a milestone for human development in the space sector.

Comment for Questions and Queries.