bdmetronews Desk॥ The history books will mark Wednesday, April 10, as the day humanity got its first look at a black hole.
That’s when astronomers around the world unveiled the results of the “herculean task” of providing the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole captured by a global network of eight telescopes on five continents, collectively called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).
The “event horizon” marks the distance from a black hole at which light is trapped by its enormous gravity, the point of no return.
“We have seen what we thought was unseeable,” said EHT director Sheperd Doeleman at a press briefing hosted by the National Science Foundation and EHT in Washington, D.C. “We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole.”
“We’ve been studying black holes so long, sometimes it’s easy to forget that none of us have actually seen one,” said France Cordova, director of the National Science Foundation, at the D.C. conference, one of seven concurrent briefings in cities including Brussels, Shanghai and Tokyo.
This is M87* and this the first image of a black hole! Mass is 6.5 Billion suns within size of a solar system. Precious because real. Waited 25 years for this. Dark shadow is where light disappears in #eventhorizon. We see something never seen before. #blackhole #JustWow #EHT pic.twitter.com/3nCosTzyER
— Heino Falcke (@hfalcke) April 10, 2019
