For years, astronomers are discussing the baffling mysterious entities in the universe, the black hole, which is so strong that nothing, not even light can escape its strong gravitational effects.
Finally, the first ever picture of a black hole is captured and released in the world for everybody to see, making us understand about the most perplexing object ever known. It could help verify or cast doubt upon long-held ideas about gravity and the nature of existence itself. This is easily the most important photo of something 26,000 light-years away that you’ll ever see.
The picture shows a halo of dust and gas, tracing the outline of a colossal black hole, at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, 55 million light years from Earth. The light surrounding the object is much brighter than that of surrounding galaxies, allowing it to be captured at such an incredible distance.
The image required connecting eight existing high-altitude telescopes, including ones in Chile and Antarctica, to reach an angular resolution high enough to capture such a relatively compact object (the event horizon is “just” 24.9 billion miles across) at an extreme distance. This technique, very-long-baseline interferometry, requires synchronized atomic clocks and even takes advantage of the rotation of the Earth.