Page 28 - ARUBA TODAY

A28 SCIENCE
Thursday 11 april 2019
Science fact: Astronomers reveal first image of a black hole

By SETH BORENSTEIN
AP Science Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — Hu-
manity 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 astro-
physics and stirred talk of
a Nobel Prize, scientists re-
leased the first image ever
made of a black hole, re-
vealing a fiery doughnut-
shaped object in a galaxy
53 million light-years from
Earth.
“Science fiction has be-
come science fact,” Uni-
versity of Waterloo theo-
retical physicist Avery Brod-
erick, 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 ra-
dio telescopes around the
world, shows light and gas
swirling around the lip of a This April 4, 2019, photo, provided by Maunakea Observatories shows the Submillimeter Array, part of the Event Horizon Telescope
supermassive black hole, network on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
a monster of the universe Associated Press
whose existence was theo- “We have seen what we predicted. The new image, bly into the hole — is as big because of the particu-
rized by Einstein more than thought was unseeable. published in the Astrophysi- as our entire solar system. lar forces exerted by an
a century ago but con- We have seen and taken cal Journal Letters and an- Black holes are the “most object as big as the one
firmed only indirectly over a picture of a black hole,” nounced around the world, extreme environment in in M87, someone could
the decades. announced Sheperd Doel- adds light to that sound. the known universe,” Brod- fall into it and not be torn
Supermassive black holes eman of Harvard, leader of Outside scientists suggest- erick said, a violent, churn- to pieces. But the person
are situated at the center the project. ed the achievement could ing place of “gravity run would never be heard from
of most galaxies, including Jessica Dempsey, another be worthy of a Nobel, just amok.” Unlike smaller black or seen again.
ours, and are so dense that co-discoverer and deputy like the gravitational wave holes, which come from Black holes are “like the
nothing, not even light, can director of the East Asian discovery. “I think it looks collapsed stars, supermas- walls of a prison. Once you
escape their gravitational Observatory in Hawaii, said very convincing,” said An- sive black holes are myste- cross it, you will never be
pull. Light gets bent and the fiery circle reminded drea Ghez, director of the rious in origin. able to get out and you will
twisted around by gravity her of the flaming Eye of UCLA Galactic Center Despite decades of study, never be able to communi-
in a bizarre funhouse ef- Sauron from the “Lord of Group, who wasn’t part of there are a few holdouts cate,” said astronomer Avi
fect as it gets sucked into the Rings” trilogy. the discovery team. who deny black holes ex- Loeb, who is director of the
the abyss along with super- Three years ago, scientists The picture was made with ist, and this work shows Black Hole Initiative at Har-
heated gas and dust. using an extraordinarily equipment that detects that they do, said Boston vard but was not involved
The new image confirmed sensitive observing system wavelengths invisible to the University astronomer pro- in the discovery.
yet another piece of Ein- heard the sound of two human eye, so astronomers fessor Alan Marscher, a co- The telescope data was
stein’s general theory of much smaller black holes added color to convey discoverer. gathered two years ago,
relativity. Einstein even pre- merging to create a gravi- the ferocious heat of the The project cost $50 million over four days when the
dicted the object’s neatly tational wave, as Einstein gas and dust, glowing at to $60 million, with $28 mil- weather had to be just
symmetrical shape. a temperature of perhaps lion of that coming from right all around the world.
millions of degrees. But if a the National Science Foun- Completing the image was
person were to somehow dation. The same team has an enormous undertaking,
get close to this black hole, gathered even more data involving an international
it might not look quite like on a black hole in the cen- team of scientists, super-
that, astronomers said. ter of our own Milky Way computers and hundreds
The black hole is about 6 galaxy, but scientists said of terabytes of data.
billion times the mass of our the object is so jumpy they When scientists initially put
sun and is in a galaxy called don’t have a good picture all that data into the first
M87. Its “event horizon” — yet. picture, what they saw
the precipice, or point of Myth says a black hole looked so much like what
no return where light and would rip a person apart, they expected they didn’t
matter get sucked inexora- but scientists said that believe it at first.q