After years of assumptions, we finally have the first image of what a black hole looks like and its event horizon.
Today there has been a very important event for science and that is that for the first time in history, we have seen a black hole. Scientists in charge of eight radio telescopes (one of them in Spain) have managed to 'photograph' a black hole. The event called 'Event Horizon' has served to present the first real image of a black hole. To date they have only been theories of how one of these could be, but now we have seen them.
First image of the horizon resulting from a black hole
The image looks like a giant donut, but that's because we can only see what's around it. We see a central hole, which would be the black hole, surrounded by a halo of gases and matter that are attracted by gravity. This halo is called the resulting horizon or event horizon and is all we can see.
The observed black hole is Messier 87, which is about 53 million light years from our planet. As we say, what we see of this is the event horizon where the light is bent and absorbed.
This image has been captured in collaboration with eight radio telescopes (one in Spain) from around the world. But in addition, universities and scientific institutions from various countries around the world have collaborated. A special network has been created for them to be able to communicate easily.
Scientists have specified that an Earth-size telescope would be needed to image the center of M87. Individually they could never have taken the photograph, but by coordinating, they have managed to obtain a large amount of data. Researchers have had to process thousands of data to obtain the final image.
"This is an image that you would have seen if you had eyes as big as the Earth and you were observing with radio waves," says one of the scientists from the Event Horizon Telescope project.
Teamwork for black hole photography
Although the data was obtained in a week, the processing of all the data has taken months. Simply putting the data in the same space was an important task. All data was stored on hard drives and then transported to the same location. Specifically, 5 Petabytes of data were gathered on hard drives and reviewing all the data is a great task.
But this is only one part of the investigation. The next part of the investigation is to know how black holes grow and also to know how they eject material into orbit. This would help to understand why the material that surrounds Sagittarius A, the black hole in our galaxy, is unusually dim. The last of the tasks is the revision of Einstein's theory of relativity that is already more than 100 years old.
