“In April of 2017, all the dishes in the event horizon telescope swiveled, turned and stared at a galaxy 55 million light years away. It’s called Messier 87 or M 87, and there’s a supermassive black hole at its core and we are delighted to be able to report to you today that we have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole. Here it is,” says Event Horizon Telescope director Sheperd Doeleman in the video shared by The Guardian. The audience gathered at the news conferences at the U.S. National Science Foundation could be heard cheering and applauding to one of the greatest discoveries of the time.
Black hole, a cosmic abyss of immense gravity that nothing – not even light – can escape from has been a topic of discovery for many scientists for over two centuries now. It was only yesterday, April 10, 2019, that the first documented photo of a black hole was released to the world.
The picture of a halo of dust, gas, and light surrounding a dark circle deep in the heart of the M 87 galaxy was showed at six news conferences simultaneously. It was a successful representation of efforts put by 200 members, nine telescopes and six papers of Astrophysics.
A remarkable work in the process was done by a student of MIT, named Katie Bouman who came up with a key algorithm that combined all the data collected by telescopes which were almost like half a tonne hard drives, into a visual picture of the black hole.
As much as this picture of the black hole from M 87 galaxy sated the curiosity of Scientists, Astronauts, and Astro fans around the world, it has also opened greater possibilities in the field of Astronomy, one being a picture of a black hole from our Milky Way galaxy. To quote the words of S. Doeleman, “As with all great discoveries, this is just the beginning.”
