The definitive existence of black holes had previously been only limited to the realm of mathematics and in the imaginations of science fiction writers. However, that has now changed with the unveiling of the first ever direct image of the stellar object. The image was produced through a massive effort by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team.
The only way to photograph an object that was trillions of kilometers away was to create a giant telescope the size of planet earth. The EHT team did just that by collaborating with numerous telescopes around the planet, all of which were focused on one point in the sky at any given moment.
According to the team, the feat is comparable to counting the dimples of a golf ball placed in Los Angeles with the observers located in New York City.
The global telescope project required complex algorithms that took into account the rotation of the earth with calculations that were precise to a fraction of a trillionth of a second.
The array of telescopes spread across the planet produced massive amounts of data, more than a million gigabytes, which needed to be digitally transferred and processed. This required quite a lot of time given that the hard drives had to be flown from the different observatories, including an observatory located in Antarctica.
The image that was published by EHT scientist was a photo of the M87 black hole, which is around 53.49 million light years away from earth. The stellar object weighs around 6.5 billion times the mass of our Sun and is around 40 billion kilometers across.
Despite its mass and the size of the matter surrounding it, its distance from our planet is so immense that scientists were only able to capture a somewhat blurry image of it. Nonetheless, the feat is still one for the books as it is the first concrete proof that these massive monsters do exist.
As indicated in its namesake, black holes are notoriously difficult to observe given that they don't emit any light. These objects are so massive that all the matter simply collapses to a singularity and even light cannot escape.
The only way these black holes can be observed is through their interaction with light-emitting matter through their gravity. In the case of the M87 black hole, its gravity was so immense that it was flinging jets of plasma that was moving near the speed of light.
The plasma was the result of the black hole "eating" the matter around it. In the past, we have only collected its "fingerprints" around the universe, but this is the first time that we have ever photographed it directly.
The most important take-home from the image is how it proves Einstein theory of gravity, space, and time. The data collected by the EHT team proved Einstein's calculations were correct; from the effects of the black hole's gravity to the speeds of the matter surrounding it.
