Finally, the world’s wait is over, and NASA has released the first ever picture of a BLACK HOLE in a distant galaxy. The image of a dark core covered with an orange flame of gas and plasma shows a supermassive black hole which is 55 million light years away from the Earth in Messier 87 galaxy. The image had taken by a group of eight radio telescopes around the world. The supermassive celestial body has a diameter of forty billion kilometers across, which is three million times the size of our Earth and hence is described as “A Monster” by scientists. The mass of this monster is 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun, and it is even larger than the size of our entire solar system.
So scientists have put a halt on our imaginations about black holes by revealing the eagerly waited image of a black hole. But, rather than the large shape and size of a black hole what is it? What are the mysteries of black holes? The scientists have already solved some of the secrets, but still, there is a lot to come.
The black hole is a cosmic trapdoor from which neither light nor any matter can escape. Since it can’t reflect any light from it, hence it is not visible or unseeable. But, the latest observations have taken astronomers right to its threshold for the first time, illuminating the event horizon beyond which all known physical laws collapse. The boundary of the region from which no escape is possible is called the event horizon. Although the event horizon has an enormous effect on the fate and circumstances of an object crossing it, no locally detectable features seem to be observed. The EHT picks up radiation emitted by particles within the disk that are heated to billions of degrees as they swirl around the black hole at close to the speed of light, before vanishing down the plughole. The halo’s crescent-like appearance in the image is because the particles in the side of the disk rotating towards Earth are flung towards us faster and so appear brighter. The dark shadow within marks the edge of the event horizon, the point of no return, beyond which no light or matter can travel fast enough to escape the inexorable gravitational pull of the black hole.
Once the famous, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking had said that if we could find a way to travel fast enough to break through the enormous gravitational force of black holes, then it would be used for time travel. The gravitational force of black holes reduced the speed of time around their monstrous sized bodies which could reduce the time spent near the black holes by the half of the time spent on the Earth. But so far not even lights can pass through the gravitational pull of the black holes. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole. In many ways, a black hole acts as an ideal black body, as it reflects no light.
So the black hole images are one of greatest leads for the astronomers and scientist which can reveal more secrets about these monstrous celestial bodies and also it can help in explaining the mysteries of the big bang incident and the formation of our universe.
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