-Mysara Juairia Chowdhury
10 April 2019,the news that the first ever photo of a Blackhole was captured broke the Internet. The world was astonished by the fact that a milestone which once was considered not possible, was achieved by a group of international scientists. An extraordinary team of scientists and computer scientists worked together for over a decade to accomplish this project. The success of this project shook the science world as it confirmed that Einstein’s theory of General Relativity is absolutely right. But how was this achieved? How could they capture the picture of something that even light can’t escape from?
A Blackhole could be simply described as a region in space-time where the gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light can escape from. A Blackhole is formed when the core of a dead star becomes unstable and gravitationally collapses inward. But it is not empty space, it is densely packed with matter in a very small space. It is like a interstellar vacuum cleaner, it pulls all the matter around it. But it is hard to take a picture of an celestial body which light cannot escape from. So the scientists and computer engineers worked out a different and elaborate plan to capture the photograph of a Blackhole. A string of global network of telescopes called the Event Horizon was used. The telescopes were scattered throughout the earth in different locations like Arizona, Hawaii, Chile, Mexico, Antarctica and Spain. The Event Telescope is a Radio telescope and there are in total eight. The telescopes cover the whole diameter of the Earth and is approximately 40 billion kilometers wide.
The telescope used a method called ‘Very Long Baseline Interferometer (VLBI)' . The principle of interferometry is to take telescopes and use them at the same time to observe an object. Then all the data from the telescopes are combined to virtually put a picture together. The Blackhole that was pictured was M87*,in the center of the Messier 87 Galaxy in Virgo Constellation. The Blackhole is actually black as there is no light but the golden ring that surrounds it is jet of plasma radiation that is being pulled into the singularity by the gravitational pull.
Even though the procedure sounds easy, it is extremely complicated in reality. It took almost 400 science professionals for over more than a decade to achieve this accomplishment. And their hard work was paid off as they won the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The next mission for this team is to capture the image of Sagittarius A*, the Blackhole in the center of Milky-way. This achievement is a huge accomplishment for the human race. And this picture opens a new era for Astrophysics and shows how infinitely vast our Universe is. More telescopes are being added to the Event Horizon chain and this opens a greater field of discovery for the scientists.
Mysara Juairia Chowdhury, Content Writer/Sub-Editor
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