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Gargantua black hole3/19/2023 ![]() The Event Horizon Telescope that imaged the black hole is actually 10 telescopes, linked across four continents in the United States, Mexico, Chile, Spain, and Antarctica, and designed to scan the cosmos in radio waves. The size of the black holes at the center of M87 along with its relative proximity to Earth, led astronomers to think that it could be the first black hole that they could actually “see.” M87 is the largest, most massive galaxy in the nearby universe and it is thought to have formed from the merging of 100 or so smaller galaxies. M87’s Gargantuan Black Hole –Unveils Light of the Entire UniverseĪstronomers have theorized that the black hole at the center of M87 grew to its massive size by merging with several other black holes. Perhaps it is the closest thing there is to hell: it is an abyss, a moment of oblivion.” It’s the point at which every physical law of the known universe collapses. “Everything unfortunate enough to get too close to it falls in and never emerges again, including light itself. And this black hole, a super-massive object at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87 shown above), really is a monster, observed Ellie Mae O’Hagan for The Guardian. “The gates of hell, the end of space and time.” That was how the black hole was described at the press conference in Brussels where the first ever photograph of one was revealed to an excited audience. “The gates of hell, the end of space and time” ![]() Over the eons that it took light to reach the solar system from M87, said astrophysicist Janna Levin at Columbia University, “we emerged on Earth along with our myths, differentiated cultures, ideologies, languages and varied beliefs.” The capability of this array reaches an imaging resolution that is 4,000 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope. The image was captured by a telescope array that has a combined aperture equivalent to the radius of planet Earth. Over the eons that it took light to reach the solar system from M87 we emerged on Earth along with our myths, differentiated cultures, ideologies, languages and varied beliefs. The size of the event horizon for this black hole is comparable to our solar system but it has a mass of six and a half billion suns packed into the same volume. At a distance of ~55 million light years, we were seeing this object as it appeared in the distant past. In April 2019 an event took place that was as epic as the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, and may make Chaisson’s warning seem prescient.įor the first time the world viewed an image of what had once been only theoretical: a supermassive black hole at the heart of galaxy M87. “Researchers argue that it’s of utmost importance to unravel the nature of black holes, lest we someday begin to worship them,” said Harvard astrophysicist, Eric Chaisson.
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